Defendant Not Told Emphatically of the Danger of Bad Immigration Consequences Reversed

Alien takes deferred adjudication for assault family violence and violation of a protective order, gets adjudicated, gets processed for removal after his sentence is over. Alien says that he never would have pleaded guilty or no contest if he had known the plea was going to get him deported, and files habeas. Trial counsel says that he did not recall if he had advised the alien about the immigration consequences of his plea and that it was not his usual practice to do so. The plea paperwork warns that a plea may lead to removal, etc. Trial court refused habeas. Texas's First Court of Appeals in Houston held on that record that the alien's plea was involuntary and granted the relief.
The alien filed one habeas petition for each conviction; the opinions as to each are identical. The style of the case is Enyong v. State, Nos. 01-11-00943-CR and 01-11-00944-CR, (Tex. App.--Houston [1st Dist.] Apr. 26, 2012) (orig. proceedings).
The court seemed to feel bound by a prior opinion of theirs: Ex parte Tanklevskaya, No. 01-10-00627-CR, (Tex. App.--Houston [1st Dist.] 2011) (orig. proceeding), otherwise, I don't think that they would have ruled that same way, after all, the admonitions of the plea give notice of the possibility of deportation, etc. The worst that can be said of the written notices are that instead of saying that bad immigration consequences are almost certain to come from taking the plea, it merely says that those consequences may come.

Where Does an Appeal of the Board of Immigration Appeals Go to?

Let say that your client wants to appeal a ruling of an immigration judge. The appeal in that case is commonly to the Board of Immigration Appeals in Virginia, and the appeal from there is commonly directly to a United States Circuit Court of Appeals. The world "commonly" here is important; the rules about what is or is not appealable are complicated, just understand that ordinarily when a person is fighting a removal order, one normally goes from the BIA straight to an appeals court, bypassing a judicial-branch federal trial court entirely.