In Ewalt v. GateHouse Media Ohio Holdings, No. 25-4015 (6th Cir. May 22, 2026), the Sixth Circuit agrees with the defendant that the district court ought not have remanded this CAFA (Class Action Fairness Act) case after denying class certification, but holds that the remand could no longer be challenged after the 30-day window for removing the case expired.
Plaintiffs filed a putative class action lawsuit against defendant GateHouse in Ohio state court in 2019. GateHouse timely removed the case to federal court (28 U.S.C. § 1446), invoking federal jurisdiction under CAFA (28 U.S.C. § 1332(d)).
“For most of the next five years, the parties litigated the dispute in its new federal home. Eventually, the district court issued an order denying plaintiffs’ motion for class certification . . . . In the same order, the district court remanded the case to state court, concluding that the district court could no longer exercise jurisdiction over the case following the denial of class certification, and declined to exercise supplemental jurisdiction.”
After the state court certified a class in 2025, the defendant removed the case back to federal court, again citing CAFA. The district court denied the plaintiffs’ motion to remand, holding that even if it was filed too late, the 30-day deadline for removal was equitably tolled. Plaintiffs appealed under 28 U.S.C. § 1453(c)(1).
The Sixth Circuit reverses and orders the case remanded back to state court.
The panel agrees that the district court legally erred in holding, in the first instance, that it automatically lost CAFA jurisdiction when it denied class certification. “[E]very circuit court to speak on the issue has agreed that CAFA jurisdiction survives the denial of class certification,” citing seven circuits and several district court decisions in support. The district court even confessed that its original remand order was improper.
The problem for defendant is that its second removal petition came some 2,000 days after the original filing of the state class-action complaint that triggers the 30-day removal period.
Defendant “assert[ed] that plaintiffs’ class certification effort in state court following remand effectively reset the removal clock.” The panel rejects that argument. A “motion in state court to certify a case as a class action, as occurred here, does not serve as a basis for retriggering the 30-day removal clock so long as the original complaint contained ’solid and unambiguous information that the case [was] removable’ . . . . Once the default removal clock started ticking, GateHouse had exactly 30 days to remove.”
And although the district court permitted the removal on a theory of equitable tolling, the intervening Supreme Court decision in Enbridge Energy, LP v. Nessel ex rel. Michigan, 146 S. Ct. 1074 (2026), knocked that possibility out: the Supreme Court held that the 30-day deadline of § 1446(b)(1) is jurisdictional and thus cannot be equitably tolled.
“We recognize the obvious reality that GateHouse’s fate was largely the result of an error it did not commit. While we are powerless to turn back time and remedy the error, GateHouse was not similarly powerless in the face of the district court’s remand order. GateHouse had good-faith legal arguments that the case should have remained in federal court even after class certification was denied. Yet GateHouse stayed silent. The company neither filed a motion contesting the district court’s remand order nor sought certification of that order for interlocutory appeal. See 28 U.S.C. § 1453(c)(1). To be sure, the state of play here was atypical. Yet that reality does not change the fact that GateHouse had opportunities to address the matter in a timely fashion. Regrettably, its belated attempt to do so came too late in the day.”
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