For fourteen years, a travel document called advance parole worked like a safety net. It let someone with a pending immigration case step outside the U.S. and come back without that trip counting against them. On August 13, 2026, the Board of Immigration Appeals cut a hole in that net, ruling that a trip taken on advance parole can now be treated as a legal "departure" — language that, for certain immigrants, can trigger years-long bans on returning to the country at all.
