394
Opinion of the Court
consolidated with the review of the order." 8 U. S. C. § 1105a(a)(6).
By its terms, § 106(a)(6) contemplates two petitions for review and directs the courts to consolidate the matters. The words of the statute do not permit us to say that the filing of a petition for reconsideration or reopening dislodges the earlier proceeding reviewing the underlying order. The statute, in fact, directs that the motion to reopen or reconsider is to be consolidated with the review of the order, not the other way around. This indicates to us that the action to review the underlying order remains active and pending before the court. We conclude that the statute is best understood as reflecting an intent on the part of Congress that deportation orders are to be reviewed in a timely fashion after issuance, irrespective of the later filing of a motion to reopen or reconsider.
Were a motion for reconsideration to render the underlying order nonfinal, there would be, in the normal course, only one petition for review filed and hence nothing for the judiciary to consolidate. As in Locomotive Engineers itself, review would be sought after denial of reconsideration, and both the underlying order and the denial of reconsideration would be reviewed in a single proceeding, insofar, at least, as denial of reconsideration would be reviewable at all. See Locomotive Engineers, 482 U. S., at 280. Indeed, the Ninth Circuit, which before the 1990 amendment had held that pendency of a reconsideration motion did render a deportation order nonfinal, understood that the tolling rule contemplates just one petition for review: "Congress visualized a single administrative proceeding in which all questions relating to an alien's deportation would be raised and resolved, followed by a single petition in a court of appeals for judicial review . . . ." Yamada v. INS, 384 F. 2d 214, 218 (CA9 1967). The tolling rule is hard to square with the existence of two separate judicial review proceedings.
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