🤮☠️🏴☠️👎🏻🆘⚰️
The Attorney General has issued a decision in Matter of A-C-A-A-, 28 I&N Dec. 84 (A.G. 2020)
- In conducting its review of an alien’s asylum claim, the Board of Immigration Appeals (“Board”) must examine de novo whether the facts found by the immigration judge satisfy all of the statutory elements of asylum as a matter of law. See Matter of R‑A‑F‑, 27 I&N Dec. 778 (A.G. 2020).
- When reviewing a grant of asylum, the Board should not accept the parties’ stipulations to, or failures to address, any of the particular elements of asylum—including, where necessary, the elements of a particular social group. Instead, unless it affirms without opinion under 8 C.F.R. § 1003.1(e)(4)(i), the Board should meaningfully review each element of an asylum claim before affirming such a grant, or before independently ordering a grant of asylum. See Matter of L‑E‑A‑, 27 I&N Dec. 581, 589 (A.G. 2019).
- Even if an applicant is a member of a cognizable particular social group and has suffered persecution, an asylum claim should be denied if the harm inflicted or threatened by the persecutor is not “on account of” the alien’s membership in that group. That requirement is especially important to scrutinize where the asserted particular social group encompasses many millions of persons in a particular society.
- An alien’s membership in a particular social group cannot be “incidental, tangential, or subordinate to the persecutor’s motivation . . . [for] why the persecutor[] sought to inflict harm.” Matter of A‑B‑, 27 I&N Dec. 316, 338 (A.G. 2018) (citations omitted). Accordingly, persecution that results from personal animus or retribution generally does not support eligibility for asylum.
__________________________________________________
Executive Office for Immigration Review
Office of Policy
Communications and Legislative Affairs Division
PAO.EOIR@usdoj.gov
703-305-0289
***************
To state the obvious, “personal animus” and “retribution” often are involved in cases where race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social, or political opinion is “at least one central reason” for the persecution. That’s what the “mixed motive” doctrine is all about.
Look at Nazi Germany where many of the persecutors stood to gain personally or professionally or to extract retribution from the removal of their Jewish neighbors or former colleagues from society. What do you think happened to the property, possessions, and positions of those sent off to be gassed?
Billy the Bigot’s unethical, illegal, and immoral attempt to rewrite asylum law is part and parcel of the “any reason to deny” program aimed disproportionally at women (probably the “most persecuted social group in the world“) and applicants of color. Yet, time and again, Article III Courts fail to effectively “call out” this racism and misogyny driving an illegal rewrite of asylum laws! Asylum is intended to “protect, not reject.”
Also to state the obvious, this decision makes party stipulations, a key to fairly reducing the backlog and achieving justice in an adversary system, meaningless. Applied across the board, this would basically disable the American justice system at both the Federal and State levels.
But, of course, the Bigot’s real intent is to dump on asylum seekers, who tend to be individuals of color. The same standards won’t necessarily be applied when the interests of certain privileged White folks are at stake. It’s the unconstitutional, intentionally “unequal justice system” promoted by the GOP.
It’s another example of “Dred Scottification” of minorities and the most vulnerable by the regime and the Federal Courts. Once, a better qualified Supremes required the Executive to carry out the statutory mandate of a generous asylum system that complied with international standards (INS v. Cardoza-Fonseca). Now, it’s all about the Supremes’ majority’s furthering the regime’s White Nationalist agenda!
The Supremes’ GOP majority has been too intellectually dishonest and past Dem Administrations too “willfully dense” to connect the dots. But, this type of neo-Fascist nonsense by a bigot totally unqualified for public office, let alone purporting to serve in a quasi-judicial capacity, is a gross violation of established ethical standards that ties directly into the breakdown in the fabric of our society in a crescendo of racism, bigotry, false narratives, public mistrust, and authoritarianism! Lawyers with immigration and human rights experience recognize this, even if others are blind — whether willfully or negligently.
There is no excuse for an intentionally enfeebled, intellectually dishonest, and too often anti-democracy Federal Judiciary that has failed to hold Trump, Barr, Wolf, Miller, Francisco, and other other members of the anti-democracy, Jim Crow movement that drives today’s GOP accountable for their unethical, unconstitutional conduct, overt racism, and other gross misdeeds!
Better judges for a better America! Vote the kakistocracy out this Fall and usher in the age of the “Radical Progressive Humanitarian Judiciary” before it’s too late! Equal justice applies to all persons, not just Billy the Bigot’s favored, largely White male, class.
Convicted felons get reduced sentenced and motions to dismiss charges. Corrupt public officials avoid the law and mock ethical standards. Refugees of color get banishment and death!
Due Process Forever! Billy The Bigot Never!
PWS
09-25-20
