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Trump Administration’s 11th Hour Attempt to Restrict Refugee Claims Blocked by Federal Court

Posted on: January 9th, 2021 by Art Leonard No Comments

The Trump Administration’s last-minute rulemaking on refugee law hit a roadblock on January 8 when a federal district court in San Francisco granted a request from organizations that represent refugees to issue a nation-wide preliminary injunction that will stop the rule from going into effect as scheduled on January 11.  District Judge James Donato found that the plaintiffs are likely to prevail on their claim that “Acting” Secretary Chad Wolf of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) did not have the authority to approve the rule because he was not validly appointed to that position.  The court will schedule a hearing soon to consider the plaintiffs’ further argument that the rule violates the Administrative Procedure Act and is inconsistent with federal immigration statutes and treaty obligations.  Pangea Legal Services v. U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security, No. 20-cv-09253-JD; Immigration Equality v. U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security, No. 20-cv-09258-JD.

The federal Immigration and Nationality Act authorizes asylum in the United States for any foreign national found to be a “refugee,” which includes any person who cannot return to their home country “because of persecution or a well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.”  Determining who qualifies as a refugee is up to the Secretary of Homeland Security or the Attorney General.  During the Clinton Administration, Attorney General Janet Reno formally signified that people who suffered persecution on account of their sexual orientation could be considered members of a “particular social group” and since then many LGBTQ people have been awarded asylum in the United States, which allows them to live and work here, to travel abroad and to return.  Those who do not qualify for asylum may avoid being removed from the U.S. by showing that their “life or freedom would be threatened” in their home country “because of the alien’s race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion,” a status referred to as “withholding of removal.”

In addition, the United States is a party to the United Nations Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment.  No party to the treaty “shall expel, return or extradite a person to another State where there are substantial grounds for believing that he would be in danger of being subject to torture.”  In some cases, LGBT petitioners have been able to claim protection under this Treaty due to the severe mistreatment of LGBTQ people in their home countries.

As part of its general policy of reducing the flow of people from other countries into the United States, the Trump Administration has promulgated a variety of policies formally approved by Chad Wolf, all of which are under attack in the courts.  Last June 15, DHS and the Justice Department published a notice of proposed rulemaking in the Federal Register, purporting to establish new rules intended to “streamline” the process of dealing with refugee applicants.  As usual with this Administration, “streamline” is a euphemism for sharply restricting the ability of people to qualify as refugees.

Most harmful for LGBTQ applicants is that the rule would eliminate all gender-based refugee claims, would drastically tighten the list of circumstances under which somebody who came to the U.S. without a visa issued by the State Department could claim refugee status and seek to remain here, and would apparently do away with the class of situations where the persecution is perpetrated by non-governmental actors.  Despite the complexity of the proposed rules, which took up 43 pages of small-type text in the Federal Register, only 30 days were given for public comment.  Judge Donato notes that over 87,000 comments were submitted “and they overwhelmingly opposed the proposed rule, often with detailed reasoning and analysis.”

Despite the flood of adverse comments, DHS and DOJ published a final rule in the Federal Register on December 11 that is “substantially the same” as the June 15 proposed rule, and set it to go into effect in one month.  The plaintiffs in this case promptly filed their lawsuits, two of which are combined before Judge Donato.  Immigration Equality, an LGBT rights organization, is one of the lead plaintiffs, with Lambda Legal and private attorneys helping to litigate the case.  The plaintiffs promptly filed a motion to stop the new rule from going into effect while the litigation proceeds.

In granting the motion, Judge Donato described the odd way the Trump Administration failed to comply with established procedures for designating the Secretary of DHS.  By statute, the DHS Secretary is to be nominated by the President and confirmed by the Senate, but the last person confirmed by the Senate, Kirstjen Nielsen, resigned effective April 10, 2019, and no new Secretary has been confirmed.  Under existing rules, Christopher Krebs, the Director of Cyber Security and Infrastructure Security, was supposed to become “Acting Secretary” and the President was to send the Senate a nomination for a new Secretary to be confirmed.  Trump has frequently stated his preference for “Acting” people to head agencies so he could quickly fire them if necessary.  Trump tweeted out a statement bypassing the usual procedures, stating that Kevin McAleenan, the Commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, would be the “Acting Secretary.”  Since this was not in accord with the succession plan spelled out in a 2016 Executive Order, McAleenan’s appointment was arguably not valid.  McAleenan then adopted a succession plan in November 2019 that effectively made Chad Wolf his successor when McAleenan resigned.  Since McAleenan was not legally in his position, he did not have the authority to do this, so Wolf’s appointment is also likely invalid.

Since a new regulation requires the approval of the Secretary and there is no validly appointed Secretary of DHS, the plaintiffs have a strong argument that the regulation was not validly promulgated and cannot take effect.  At least, Judge Donato concluded, they are likely to prevail on this point when the court reaches the merits of the case.  For purposes of deciding on issuing the preliminary injunction that is all he had to decide, putting off to later the plaintiffs’ argument that the regulation is inconsistent with the statute and the country’s treaty obligation.

Judge Donato was scathing in describing the Justice Department’s attempt to justify Wolf’s authority in the face of four previous adverse decisions by federal courts.  The government filed appeals of three of those rulings but withdrew two of the appeals and one is still pending.  “This Court is now the fifth federal court to be asked to plow the same ground about Wolf’s authority vel non to change the immigration regulations,” he commented.  “If the government had proffered new facts or law with respect to that question, or a hitherto unconsidered argument, this might have been a worthwhile exercise.  It did not.”  To the judge’s apparent astonishment, the government’s attorney at the hearing on this motion, August Flentje, just argued that the prior court rulings were “wrong, with scant explanation,” which Donato characterized as a “troubling strategy.  In effect, the government keeps crashing the same car into the gate, hoping that someday it might break through.”

“A good argument might be made, at this point in time, the government’s arguments lack a good-faith basis in law or fact,” continued Donato, but he concluded it was unnecessary for him to make such a drastic finding, since his own review of the record indicates that “the latest decision before this order correctly identified and analyzed the salient points vitiating Wolf’s claim of rulemaking authority, and the Court agrees with it in full.”

This case shows the Trump Administration’s general contempt for the federal judiciary, especially (but not only) when a judge appointed by President Barack Obama (such as Judge Donato) is hearing the case.  Judge Donato found that letting the rule go into effect would irreparably harm the plaintiff organizations in their missions to represent asylum seekers, and that the balance of hardship between the plaintiffs, the government, and the public interest all tilted in favor of issuing the injunction.

Once a final regulation has been published in the Federal Register, it cannot be simply withdrawn by the next Administration, but this preliminary injunction will give breathing room for the Biden Administration’s incoming DHS and DOJ leadership to put the wheels in motion under the Administrative Procedure Act to terminate or replace it, if the court doesn’t dispose of it first by issuing a final ruling on the merits that it was invalidly promulgated.  Issuing the preliminary injunction was a promising first step.

Among the attorneys working on the case are Immigration Equality Legal Director Bridget Crawford and Executive Director Aaron Morris, Lambda Legal attorneys Jennifer C. Pizer, Omar Gonzalez-Pagan and Richard Saenz, and cooperating attorneys Jeffrey S. Trachtman, Aaron M. Frankel, Chase Mechanik, Jason M. Moff and Austin Manes from the law firm Kramer Levin Naftalis & Frankel LLP.

2nd Circuit Rejects Gay Brazilian Man’s Refugee Claims, Despite Evidence About Anti-Gay Violence in Brazil

Posted on: May 1st, 2017 by Art Leonard No Comments

Opening up a gulf in reasoning with the 9th Circuit, which has insisted on a distinction between the official policies of a government and the facts on the ground in evaluating whether gay people would suffer persecution or worse in a particular country, a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit affirmed a ruling by an Immigration Judge (IJ) and the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) that a gay man from Brazil could not win refugee status in the United States, despite the documented high rate of murders of gay men in that country and the asserted inability of the government to do anything about it. Dias v. Sessions, 2017 WL 1437117, 2017 U.S. App. LEXIS 7088 (2nd Cir., April 24, 2017) (not  published in F.3d).

Because the appeal was decided under the 2nd Circuit’s special summary proceeding method to deal with the huge caseload of refugee appeals generated in the New York metropolitan region, the per curiam opinion emanating from a panel consisting of Circuit Judges Reena Raggi, Peter W. Hall and Denny Chin is light on facts.  The Petitioner, a native and citizen of Brazil, apparently came to the attention of the Department of Homeland Security as a result of a criminal conviction, but the court does not state any details about that, or the circumstances under which he came to be in the United States and subject to removal.  Petitioner applied for asylum, withholding of removal, and/or protection under the Convention against Torture (CAT), all of which were denied by an Immigration Judge on May 7, 2014, in a decision that was affirmed by the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) on September 9, 2015.  In addition to finding that the Petitioner failed to meet the burden of showing he would likely be subjected to persecution or torture if removed to Brazil, the IJ found that he could relocate within Brazil to a safer place than that from which he came.  The BIA did not affirm on the relocation finding, which was unnecessary in light of the finding on the merits.

“Although [Petitioner] did not articulate it as such,” wrote the court, “his claim is that private parties have a pattern or practice of persecuting gay men in Brazil, which the government is unable to stop. [He] predicts that people in Brazil will discover that he is gay either from the Internet article about his crime, from his family, or from a future relationship with a man.  He asserts that homophobic violence is rampant in Brazil, citing a State Department report that killings based on sexual orientation rose from 2011 to 2012, and a Chicago Tribune article on a 1995 study that found 59% of gay Brazilians had suffered some type of homophobic violence.  He cites a study finding that a gay person’s risk of being killed there is 785 percent greater than in the United States and several high-profile cases of homophobic murders.  He acknowledges that Brazil has gay marriage, active gay rights groups, and certain cities with anti-discrimination laws, but argues that this evidences shows that Brazil is willing but unable to stop the violence.”

The BIA, in disagreeing with these arguments, “acknowledged the evidence of violence and discrimination against gay Brazilians.” But the agency put more weight on the “official” developments – gay rights groups, gay marriage, annual gay pride parade, and city ordinances banning anti-gay discrimination – to find that the Petitioner had “failed to show the Brazilian government would be unwilling or unable to control those responsible for the violence and discrimination.”

The court commented: “Although the IJ and BIA decisions are sparse on reasoning, substantial evidence supports that finding.” The court emphasized that the Chicago Tribune article on which Petitioner relied was more than twenty years old, and that the State Department report, while citing “338 killings based on sexual orientation, acknowledged the Brazilian government’s efforts to fight discrimination and promote gay rights.”

The standard for review of a BIA determination is not a de novo reconsideration, but rather a determination whether the agency should have been “compelled” by the evidence in the record to rule in favor of the Petitioner.  Under this standard, the 2nd Circuit panel found that the BIA was not “compelled” to grant asylum or withholding of removal to the Petitioner.

Turning to the CAT claim, the court found that the agency “reasonably concluded that his predicted chain of events was speculative. Even if it is likely that [he] will have a romantic relationship with a man, the record did not compel the agency to find it more likely than not that [he] will be tortured by, or with the acquiescence of, Brazilian authorities.”

Petitioner is represented by Robert C. Ross of West Haven, CT.

The 2nd Circuit panel’s approach deviates from that recently taken by the 9th Circuit in appeals by gay men from Mexico, another country in which the movement for marriage equality has made major gains, some municipalities now ban sexual orientation discrimination, and formerly anti-gay criminal laws have been reformed, but anti-gay violence at the hands of criminal gangs, police officers, and family members of gay people remains a major concern.  In Bringas-Rodriguez v. Sessions, 850 F.3d 1051 (9th Cir. 2017), recently reiterated in Hernandez v. Sessions, 2017 WL 1404699 (9th Cir., April 20, 2017), the court “made clear” that its earlier precedents on refugee claims by gay Mexicans “falsely equated legislative and executive enactments prohibiting persecution with on-the-ground progress” and insisted that the U.S. immigration authorities must look beyond such “official” positions to consider the situation that gay people actually face in countries where there is pervasive anti-gay hostility about which the governments can do little.  The 9th Circuit has been particularly emphatic in protecting transgender refugee applicants.  In cases where local police officials are part of the problem, the 9th Circuit has chided immigration authorities for failing to recognize such harassment as being attributable to the government.  The Supreme Court has yet to decide any case involving a claim for refugee status in the United States by a gay or transgender applicant.

9th Circuit En Banc Panel Revives Gay Mexican’s Asylum Claim

Posted on: March 12th, 2017 by Art Leonard No Comments

An eleven-judge panel of the San Francisco-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit revived an HIV-positive gay Mexican man’s claim for refugee status to remain in the United States on March 8, reversing rulings by a three-judge panel of the court, the Board of Immigration Appeals, and an Immigration Judge.  The opinion for the court in Bringas-Rodriguez v. Sessions, 2017 U.S. App. LEXIS 4077, 2017 WL 908546, was written by Judge Kim McLane Wardlaw, a Clinton appointee.  One member of the court, Judge Richard R. Clifton, filed a concurring opinion, and two members, Judges Carlos T. Bea and Diarmuid O’Scannlain, dissented in an opinion by Judge Bea.  Bea, appointed by George W. Bush, and O’Scannlain, appointed by Ronald Reagan, are among the most conservative judges on the 9th Circuit.  The reversed three-judge panel consisted of two George W. Bush appointees and a dissenting Clinton appointee, William Fletcher.

Carlos Alberto Bringas-Rodriguez, born in Tres Valles, Veracruz State, was, according to Judge Wardlaw’s summary of his testimony, which was deemed credible by the Immigration Judge, “horrifically abused by his father, an uncle, cousins, and a neighbor, all of whom perceived him to be gay or to exhibit effeminate characteristics.”  Bringas testified that his uncle raped him when he was four, and that three of his cousins and a male neighbor “physically and sexually abused him on a regular basis while he lived in Mexico.”  He also suffered regular beatings from his father, who told him, “Act like a boy.  You are not a woman.”  He claims his uncle told him when he was eight that he was being abused because he was gay.  “His uncle, cousins, and neighbor never called him by his name,” wrote Wardlaw, “referring to him only as ‘fag, fucking faggot, queer,’ and they ‘laughed about it.’”

Bringas lived briefly with his mother in the U.S. when he was twelve, but he returned to Mexico because he missed his grandmother, who had been raising him since he was nine.  The abuse intensified when he returned.  “On one occasion, when Bringas refused to comply with his neighbor’s demand for oral copulation, the neighbor beat and raped him, leaving Bringas with black eyes and bruises,” and his abusers “also threatened to hurt his grandmother, with whom he was close, if he ever reported what was happening,” wrote Wardlaw.  “Fearing that they would follow through on their threats, Bringas did not tell his mother, teachers, or anyone else about the sexual abuse.”  He fled back to the U.S. in 2004 when he was fourteen.

Entering the country illegally at El Paso, he made his way to Kansas where he lived with his mother for the next three years.  Then he moved out of his mother’s home, living elsewhere in Kansas and in Colorado, holding several jobs.  In August 2010 he pled guilty to “attempted contributing to the delinquency of a minor” in Colorado.  According to his account, as related by Wardlaw, “he had been at home drinking with some friends when another friend brought over a minor who became drunk.”  Bringas served 90 days in jail, “during which time he attempted suicide and was hospitalized, which precipitated his finally telling a doctor and then his mother about his childhood abused.”  His conviction triggered a notice to the Department of Homeland Security, which immediately issued him a “Notice to Appear.”

The next year, at age 20, he applied for asylum, withholding of removal, and protection under the Convention against Torture (CAT).  Asylum claims normally have to be filed within a year of arrival in the U.S., but he claimed he had been “unaware” at age 14 that he could apply for asylum, and only learned of this when he “spoke with an ICE officer in Colorado in September 2010” when he responded to the Notice to Appear.  In his application, he described the abuse he had suffered in Mexico and “explained that he feared persecution if he returned because he was gay and that the Mexican police would not protect him.  Bringas also credibly testified about his gay friends’ experiences with police in Veracruz.  Those friends went to the police to report that they had been raped, but the officers ignored their reports and ‘laughed [on] their faces.’”  He also submitted State Department country human rights reports on Mexico from 2009 and 2010, as well as newspaper articles documenting violence against gays in Mexico, which showed that violence was rising even as “Mexican laws were becoming increasingly tolerant of gay rights.”  In a footnote, Judge Wardlaw cited guidelines issued by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, explaining that “legal improvements and widespread persecution are not mutually exclusive.”

An Immigration Judge found Bringas’ factual testimony to be credible, but denied his application, as did the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) on his appeal.  The IJ found that his asylum claim was untimely under the one-year rule, a point that the BIA ignored, treating his asylum claim on the merits.  Next, the IJ found, and the BIA recognized, that although Bringas had suffered “serious abuse” as a child, he did not show that the “abuse was inflicted by government actors or that the government was unwilling or unable to control his abusers.”  This was a critical finding, because the basis for establishing refugee status is to show persecution at the hands of the government or private actors whom the government is unwilling or unable to control.  Purely private abuse, as such, is not considered to be “persecution” under relevant statutes and treaties.  Having found that Bringas had not established “past persecution,” the BIA approved the IJ’s finding that there was no presumption that he had a reasonable fear of future persecution in Mexico, because he had “failed to show a pattern or practice of persecution of gay men in Mexico.”  The BIA wrote that “the record did not demonstrate widespread brutality against homosexuals or that there was any criminalization of homosexual conduct in Mexico.”  Indeed, the BIA found that the Mexican government “has taken numerous positive steps to address the rights of homosexuals.”  The IJ and BIA found no evidence that Bringas was likely to be tortured by the government if he were removed back to Mexico.

The three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit considering his appeal focused on a prior circuit ruling, Castro-Martinez v. Holder, 674 F.3d 1073 (9th Cir. 2011), concerning cases where the applicant’s abusers were all private citizens, which held that in order to establish that the government was unwilling or unable to control the abusers, the victim had to have reported the abuse to the government.  Wrote Wardlow, “the panel majority reasoned that where a victim fails to report abuse, even as a child, ‘there is a “gap in proof about how the government would have responded,”’ and that petitioner bears the burden to ‘fill in the gaps’ by showing how the government would have responded had he reported the abuse.”  The 3-judge panel emphasized the part of the State Department country reports that discussed how Mexican law had improved for gay people, including the government’s establish of a “specialized hate crimes prosecution unit” and the proclamation of a “national day against homophobia.”  The panel found “insufficient” Bringas’s testimony about the comments by his gay friends in the U.S. about how the police had failed to respond to their reports of abuse.  “Even if the friends’ reports were credited, the panel majority explained, those reports failed to establish that police practices in the city or state of Veracruz could be linked to police practices in Tres Valles, Bringas’s hometown.”

The panel majority, in common with the IJ in this case, also suggested that the issue here was not narrowly sexual abuse because of homosexuality, but rather the more general phenomenon of sexual abuse of children, and suggested that there was no evidence that the Mexican law enforcement authorities would be indifferent to reports of child sexual abuse.  In this connection, they noted that Bringas’s testimony did not specify how old his friends were when they unsuccessfully reported their abuse to the police.

Judge William Fletcher, the dissenting member of the 3-judge panel, expressed growing discomfort about the prior precedent upon which the majority of that panel was relying, pointing to the circuit’s “ample precedent that does not require victims of private persecution, especially child victims, to contemporaneously report their abuse to government authorities in order to become eligible for asylum in the United States.”

The en banc panel majority, reversing the 3-judge panel, embraced Judge Fletcher’s criticism, citing extensive evidence about the psychological and practical problems a child victim of sexual abuse would have in reporting the abuse to authorities, especially if they or their loved ones were threatened with retribution if they made any report, as had happened in Bringas’s case with threats to harm his grandmother.  Going further, the en banc panel overruled the prior precedent to the extent that it had been relied on as requiring reporting to the authorities in a case founded on abuse by non-governmental actors in order to establish “persecution” for purposes of asylum or withholding of removal.

While it was clear in this case that the asylum claim was filed too late, the court determined that Bringas’s claims for withholding of removal and protection under the CAT must be reconsidered by the Board.  The court found Bringas’ testimony, which had been deemed credible by the IJ and the BIA, sufficient to establish that he had been subjected to past persecution, and based on that testimony he was entitled to a presumption of further persecution.  Sending the case back to the BIA, the court said the remaining issue was whether that presumption had been rebutted by the government’s evidence of changed conditions in Mexico.

Furthermore, while this case was in progress, but after the BIA issued its opinion, Bringas learned for the first time that he was HIV-positive.  He had asked to reopen the case in order for the BIA to take this new information into account, but the BIA refused his request, observing that he had failed to show “how his status as an HIV positive homosexual changes the outcome of his case.”  The court ordered that BIA allow Bringas to supplement the record and to take account of new evidence about his HIV diagnosis.

Judge Clifton concurred on narrower grounds.  He felt, along with Judge Bea’s dissent, that the court’s opinion was insufficiently deferential to the BIA, which as a matter of administrative law is entitled to substantial deference by the courts and should not be reversed unless “any reasonable adjudicator would be compelled to conclude to the contrary based on evidence in the record.”  To Clifton, the evidence presented by Bringas about the unwillingness or inability of the government to address sexual abuse of gay children was not overwhelming, relying on “an unspecific hearsay report by Bringas of what he was told by one or two other persons about what had happened when a report was made to police in a different town.  That evidence would have been sufficient to support a conclusion that a report by a child to the police would have been futile, but it was not so powerful that no reasonable adjudicator could have found to the contrary,” he wrote.  He also noted that much of Bringas’ evidence was rather general and did not necessarily compel the conclusions reached by the majority of the court as to his persecution case.

On the other hand, Clifton found that the BIA “appeared to disregard the evidence that Bringas offered on the subject,” so it was appropriate to remand for reconsideration.  The IJ had written that there “was ‘no evidence whatsoever’ to support Bringas’s contention that a police report would have been futile, and it did not reflect any awareness of the evidence to that effect,” and the BIA’s opinion did not correct that misstatement.  While Clifton agreed the case should be sent back, he, unlike the majority, “would not dictate the answer to that past persecution question” but rather allow the BIA to reweigh the evidence.

Judge Bea’s dissent, as mentioned by Judge Clifton, focused on the court’s failure to accord sufficient deference to the BIA’s decision, emphasized the weak points in Bringas’s testimony, and accused the majority of mischaracterizing the precedent that it was overruling.  He also argued that the situation facing Bringas at age 14 was very different from the situation he would face today as an adult if returned to Mexico, pointing out further that the record showed that conditions for gay men in Mexico varied.  If returned to Mexico, Bringas would not have to live in Veracruz, but could instead locate in Mexico City, a jurisdiction that has legislated for same-sex marriage, supports gay pride marches, and is notably gay-friendly.

It will be interesting to see whether the government will seek Supreme Court review of this en banc ruling from the 9th Circuit.  The new Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, was substituted as Respondent for his predecessor, Loretta Lynch, upon taking office.  As this ruling may make it easier for Mexican asylum applicants to win the right to remain in the United States, the Trump Administration may seize upon it as a vehicle to tighten up on the asylum process by winning a reversal.  Certainly the Administration would have an interest in establishing deference for the BIA, given the ability of the President and Attorney General to influence the policies of that agency through appoints to the Board. In light of the timing, any review would take place after Trump’s nominee to fill the vacant seat on the Court takes the bench, re-establishing a majority of Republican appointees on the Court.

This en banc reconsideration of Bringas’s case was considered a big deal by the immigrants’ rights and civil liberties communities.  Dean Erwin Chemerinsky of the University of California (Irving) School of Law argued the appeal, with the Appellate Litigation Clinic at his school representing Bringas together with pro bono attorneys from major California law firms.  The government’s case was argued by relatively high level attorneys from the Justice Department in Washington.  Several amicus briefs were filed in support of Bringas’s appeal, including a wide variety of public interest groups, including Lambda Legal, National Center for Lesbian Rigths, the National Immigrant Justice Center, the HIV Law Project, the Transgender Law Center.  An amicus brief was submitted on behalf of Alice Farmer, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, by Williams & Connolly LLP, a major national law firm that frequently appears before the Supreme Court.

7th Circuit Remands Gay Mexican’s Withholding of Removal Claim to BIA

Posted on: August 28th, 2013 by Art Leonard No Comments
A panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit has granted a petition for review of the Board of Immigration Appeals’ (BIA) decision to deny withholding of removal to a gay, HIV-positive man from Mexico, finding that the BIA had failed to comply with a  regulation governing review of Immigration Judge (IJ) decisions by engaging in de novo review of facts decided by the IJ.  Rosiles-Camerana v. Holder, 2013 U.S. App. LEXIS 17551, 2013 WL 4457283 (August 21, 2013).  The court, in an opinion by Circuit Judge Frank Easterbrook, remanded the case to the BIA for “proceedings consistent with this opinion.”
 

The petitioner, a Mexican citizen, was brought to the U.S. in 1977, when he was ten years old, and became a permanent resident but never applied for citizenship.  He was convicted on a charge of indecent solicitation of a minor, a felony, lost his permanent resident status and was ordered to be removed to Mexico.  He argued that as an openly gay HIV-positive man, he faced a risk of persecution or torture if deported to Mexico, and sought withholding of removal and protection under the Convention Against Torture (CAT).  He persuaded the IJ, who granted both withholding relief under the statute and  under the CAT, only to be reversed by the BIA.  On remand, the IJ “adhered to his position,” but the BIA stubbornly adhered to its position, again reversing the IJ, and petitioner sought relief from the court of appeals.

The most recent BIA decision said that “the probability of future harm is a legal question that we review de novo” and “in assessing the probability of harm de novo, we may give different weight to the evidence than did the Immigration Judge.”  The BIA accepted the IJ’s findings of “historical fact” but “disagreed with the IJ about the risk implied by those facts.”  Most particularly, the IJ was convinced by expert testimony about murders of gay men in Mexico that there would be a substantial risk to the petitioner if he were deported.  But the BIA looked at the same statistics and drew a different conclusion.  The IJ was impressed that there were 148 documented hate crime murders of gays in Mexico between 1995 and 2006.  The BIA looked at that number, did its own calculations, and concluded that this meant that it was “unlikely (a risk of no more than 1 in 100,000) that any given gay man would be killed in any given year.”  Thus, the IJ’s conclusion that anti-gay murders were “frequent” did not impress the BIA, which found that petitioner failed to meet the burden of showing that there was a “clear probability” that he would be murdered if returned to Mexico. 

Wrote Easterbrook, “The Board treated the risk of future harm” – which is a dispositive issue in this kind of case – “as a matter of legislative fact, and it took the view that decisions on mixed (or ‘ultimate’) questions are open to plenary decision” on review.  The court agreed with the petitioner that “the Board made a legal error by engaging in this kind of review, pointing particularly to a regulation, 8 C.F.R. Sec. 1003.1(d)(3), that provides that “The Board will not engage in de novo review of findings of fact determined by an immigration judge,” which would include “findings as to credibility of testimony” which would be subject to a “clearly erroneous” standard for reversals.  In this case, the BIA did not reject the IJ’s findings of fact, but took the position that the determination of whether petitioner would incur a probability of persecution was not the kind of factual finding to which it need defer. 

Easterbrook noted that there is a split of authority among the circuit appeals courts about how to review such BIA decisions, and the 7th Circuit panel favored the authority represented by a 3rd Circuit decision, Kaplun v. Attorney General, 602 F.3d 260 (2010), holding that “the Board is entitled to adopt an independent view about whether a potential harm identified by an IJ amounts to ‘persecution’ or ‘torture,’ but that an IJ’s predictions (which it called the ‘present probability of a future event’) – such that a particular harm is ‘likely’ should an alien return to his native land – are ‘facts’ under clause (i) [of the regulation], and the Board’s role is limited to identifying clear error by the IJ.”

The question here, as Easterbrook puts it, is whether predictions about the probability of persecution depend primarily on country conditions, “not (necessarily) on facts unique to the alien.”  If country conditions are the most important concern, there would be much less reason to defer to findings of historical fact concerning the alien in question in reaching a sound judgment about such probability.  Easterbrook points to the concern that different IJs might reach sharply different conclusions about the probability that a gay man deported to a particular country would be subjected to persecution there, but notes the potential salience of historical facts, regardless of the overall country conditions.  In this case, the petitioner contends that “he is at greater risk” than other gay men.  “He is not only gay and HIV positive but also ‘out’ and planning to live openly with his partner.  He contends, and the IJ found, that his family has disowned him and will not offer any support.  He adds that, because he has lived in the United States most of his life and does not know contemporary Mexican customs, he will find it hard to avoid attracting attention from persons who might do him harm.  And he stresses that injuries (and deprivation of economic opportunities) short of death may amount to persecution.”

The court decided that “the question for the Board on remand is thus not whether aggregate data imply that Rosiles-Camerana is likely to be killed, but whether the IJ clearly erred in finding that he is more likely than not to be persecuted.”  That is not a question for the court to decide, but “for the Board in the first instance.”  However, the court’s summary of the petitioner’s argument makes it sound like a strong claim for individualistic fact-finding.   The court’s powers of review are limited by statute in light of the petitioner’s conviction of a felony, which leaves a large range of discretion to the Board.  On the other hand, the regulation governing the Board’s appellate authority constrains it substantially in second-guessing IJ fact-finding, as this decision shows.

9th Circuit Orders Withholding of Removal for Gay Man from Philippines

Posted on: July 25th, 2013 by Art Leonard No Comments

A unanimous panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, based in San Francisco, ruled on July 24 in Vitug v. Holder, 2013 Westlaw 3814772, that the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) should not have reversed a ruling by an Immigration Judge (IJ) that Dennis Vitug, a gay man from the Philippines, was entitled to remain in the United States under U.S. laws providing refuge for people subjected to persecution in their home countries.  The court backed up the Immigration Judge’s conclusion that Vitug had shown that he was subjected to persecution, and that the government failed to meet its burden to show that conditions in the Philippines had changed sufficiently to rebut the presumption that Vitug would suffer persecution if required to return.

Writing for the appellate panel, Judge Harry Pregerson pointed out that the IJ had found Vitug to be a credible witness and had concluded that Vitug had been beaten and robbed five times in Manila “after being targeted as a homosexual,” had been harassed by police officers based on his “perceived sexual orientation,” and had been unable to find a job “on account of his sexual orientation.”  The IJ had also found, based on the evidence Vitug presented, that (1) “The police will not do anything to help gay men who report abuse but will rather ridicule them and tell them they deserve it,” and (2) “The government has failed or refused to protect gay men from persecution.”

The IJ concluded that Vitug had been persecuted “because of his membership in the social group of homosexual Filipino men,” and that the government had not presented any contrary evidence.   The IJ also concluded that Vitug might be subjected to torture if deported back to the Philippines, finding him eligible for protection under the Convention Against Torture, an international treaty to which the U.S. is a party, which requires our country to give refuge to people who might be subjected to torture in their home country.

Under the rules governing administrative review, these IJ findings should not generally be reversible by the Board of Immigration Appeals, yet the government persuaded the BIA to reverse, based on the Board’s own view of the evidence.  (The BIA decision was issued on November 6, 2007, and is fairly representative of the kind of anti-gay bias exhibited by the BIA during the Bush Administration.)   “In reaching its decision,” wrote Judge Pregerson, “the BIA did not expressly find any of the IJ’s factual findings to be clearly erroneous.”  Instead, it predicated its reversal on its own review of the record, opining that Vitug had failed to prove that the attacks against him “rose to the level of past persecution,” that a particular attack against him by a man he met in a bar was merely a “crime of opportunity”, and that “the record does not support the conclusion that the [Philippine] government would be unable or unwilling to protect him,” because Vitug had actually returned to the Philippines after his first US visitor visa expired, then returned to the U.S. on a  new visitor visa, which he overstayed, finding work in the U.S.  Finally, the BIA found a lack of evidence in the record that Vitug would face torture in the Philippines.

Vitug filed a motion for reconsideration, but it was rejected by the BIA because it arrived one day after the filing deadline, due to a snowstorm and the grounding of FedEx planes, according to Pregerson’s opinion.  The BIA issued an amended order in February 2008 to correct a misstatement in its prior decision, and Vitug again filed for reconsideration, this time meeting the deadline, but the BIA denied his motion in a confused statement that the appeals court found to be internally contradictory.

The Court of Appeals found that the BIA had overstepped its role regarding the finding on persecution, pointing out that “DHS regulations prohibit the BIA from ‘engaging in de novo review of findings of fact determined by an immigration judge.'”  Wrote Pregerson, “We conclude that in its original November 6, 2007 decision, the BIA engaged in its own factfinding.  Such factfinding was improper.”  The court went through various aspects of the BIA opinion, pointing out places where it had obviously engaged in factfinding contrary to the facts found by the IJ, and had ignored “factual findings of the IJ that were key to the IJ’s holding,” which the court found to be an abuse of discretion.

Having found that the BIA “failed to apply the clear error standard of review to the IJ’s factual findings, and also abused its discretion by ignoring the factual findings of the IJ,” the court would normally remand the case so that BIA could apply the correct standard, but it found no need to do so here, “because substantial evidence does not support the BIA’s denial of withholding of removal.”

Pregerson pointed out that under immigration law, once a petitioner has established that he is a victim of past persecution based on one of the grounds recognized by the courts — which include, for this case, sexual orientation — there is a presumption of entitlement to the remedy of withholding of removal, which would allow the petitioner to remain in the United States.  The government can only prevail in such a case if it can “show by a preponderance of the evidence that there has been a fundamental change in circumstances such that the petitioner’s life or freedom would not be threatened or that the petitioner could relocate internally within his home country to avoid persecution.” 

In this case, wrote Pregerson, the government had failed to meet this burden.  The IJ found Vitug to be a credible witness, and accepted his testimony about the persecution he had suffered.  The government did not challenge this finding, and did not introduce any contradictory evidence.  Wrote Pregerson, “No reasonable factfinder could conclude that the harm Vitug suffered did not rise to the level of persecution in light of the cumulative effect of multiple instances of physical harm and victimization,” so he is presumptively entitled to stay in the U.S.  The only basis for the government’s argument to the contrary was some references in Vitug’s documentary evidence that there was some gay activism going on in the Philippines and that one municipality had passed a local ordinance to protect gays from discrimination.  “Such evidence, however, does not indicate that there is any less violence against gay men or that police have become more responsive to reports of antigay hate crimes,” wrote Pregerson.  “The government therefore failed to meet its burden of proof to show by a preponderance of the evidence that the circumstances within the Philippines have changed such that Vitug no longer faces a threat to his life or freedom in the Philippines.”

While the court agreed with the BIA that the IJ’s conclusion as to torture was not supported by the IJ’s factual findings and refused to upset the BIA’s reversal on the issue of Convention Against Torture relief, the court ordered the BIA to grant withholding of removal status to Vitug, ending any effort to deport him from the United States.

There is a certain irony about the case having taken so long to be considered by the 9th Circuit.  The IJ’s decision was issued in 2007, based on a hearing held in June of that year, which basically froze the factual record as of that date.  The BIA decisions came later in 2007 and early in 2008, and then Vitug appealed.  The sheer volume of asylum/withholding/CAT appeals is so great in many circuits — and especially in the 9th, which covers the entire west coast — that it may take many years until a panel of the court actually takes up the case for decision.  In this case, the court unusually scheduled a hearing, which was held on February 7, 2013, and was limited, of course, to Vitug’s argument that the BIA had improperly reversed the IJ based on the record compiled at the 2007 hearing.   It may be that conditions for gay people in the Philippines have improved since then — after all, six years have gone by and there have been some court rulings in the Philippines that have advanced gay rights — but that would be irrelevant, since the case must be decided based on the record made at the 2007 hearing.  Welcome to the surreal world of American administrative law, where time stands still!