Case ID: f-appx_622/html/0640-01.html
Source: Caselaw Access Project
Author: {"author": "", "license": "Public Domain", "url": "https://static.case.law/"}
Date Created: 2024-08-24T03:29:51.129683

Iyabo WILLIAMS, aka Iyabode Olatokunbo Naborne-Bankole, Petitioner, v. Loretta E. LYNCH, Attorney General, Respondent.
    No. 12-71571.
    United States Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit.
    Argued and Submitted Oct. 22, 2015.
    Filed Nov. 10, 2015.
    Marc Van Der Hout, Valerie Anne Zu-kin, Esquire, Van Der Hout, Brigagliano & Nightingale, LLP, San Francisco, CA, for Petitioner.
    Chief Counsel ICE, Office of the Chief Counsel Department of Homeland Security, San Francisco, CA, Sarah Maloney, OIL, U.S. Department of Justice, Washington, DC, for Respondent.
    Before: PAEZ, MURGUIA, and HURWITZ, Circuit Judges.
   MEMORANDUM

Iyabo Williams petitions for review of the Board of Immigration Appeals’ (“BIA”) order denying her motion to reopen removal proceedings. Because the BIA acted contrary to law, we hold that it abused its discretion and grant Williams’s petition for review.

1. The BIA’s order, although unclear, appears to reject Williams’s claim to changed circumstances because threats she received in 2010 were not qualitatively different than all previous threats, including threats that she continued to receive until 1997 or 1998. The BIA’s disposition therefore contravenes the applicable regulation, which requires a determination of whether Williams’s evidence is qualitatively different from evidence available at the time of her 1993 merits hearing. 8 C.F.R. § 1003.2(c)(3)(ii); see also Malty v. Ashcroft, 381 F.3d 942, 946 (9th Cir.2004).

2. The BIA’s disposition is also inconsistent with Chandra v. Holder, 751 F.3d 1034 (9th Cir.2014), because it discounted threats Williams received in the United States based op the erroneous premise that “[tjhreats in the United States are not changed conditions in Nigeria[.]” Although changed personal circumstances alone are insufficient to support a motion to reopen, they may bear on the materiality of changed circumstances in Nigeria. See id. at 1036-39.

PETITION GRANTED. 
      
       This disposition is not appropriate for publication and is not precedent except as provided by 9th Cir. R. 36-3.
     
      
      . The government acknowledged that the BIA’s "decision on this issue might have been more artfully drafted.”