Document ID: s3://data.kl3m.ai/documents/govinfo/USCOURTS/USCOURTS-ca7-19-02175/USCOURTS-ca7-19-02175-0/pdf.json

Parties Involved:
William P. Barr
Respondent
Benjamin N. Omorhienrhien
Petitioner

Document Text:

In the

United States Court of Appeals

For the Seventh Circuit ____________________

No. 19-2175

BENJAMIN N. OMORHIENRHIEN,

Petitioner,

v.

WILLIAM P. BARR, Attorney General of the United States,

Respondent.

____________________

Petition for Review of an Order of 

the Board of Immigration Appeals.

No. A200-381-476

____________________

ARGUED JANUARY 8, 2020 — DECIDED MARCH 13, 2020

____________________

Before FLAUM, ROVNER, and SCUDDER, Circuit Judges.

SCUDDER, Circuit Judge. Benjamin Omorhienrhien is a Nigerian citizen who received conditional permanent resident 

status based on his marriage to a United States citizen. The 

two later divorced, and Omorhienrhien sought to remain in 

the country by submitting a petition to remove the conditions 

on his residency. An obstacle loomed—the petition must ordinarily be jointly filed by the non-citizen and his spouse, but 

Omorhienrhien’s former spouse was no longer in the picture. 

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To sidestep the roadblock, Omorhienrhien requested a discretionary waiver of the joint-filing requirement, which is available to non-citizens who entered their failed marriages in 

good faith. After hearing all the evidence, an immigration 

judge was not persuaded that Omorhienrhien married his 

wife in good faith and denied him the waiver. The Board of 

Immigration Appeals agreed and dismissed the appeal. Omorhienrhien now asks us to step in. Because our review is limited to legal errors and we find none, we decline to do so.

I

A

Benjamin Omorhienrhien came to the United States as a 

visitor from Nigeria in 2008. Not long after arriving, he began 

a relationship with Linda Harris, a citizen whom he met 

through friends. The two exchanged vows a few months later. 

The following year, Harris filed Form I-130 (Petition for Alien 

Relative), which would allow Omorhienrhien a path to residency based on their marriage. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services denied the petition upon discovering that Omorhienrhien had been legally married to another woman in Nigeria when he tied the knot with Harris, though the Nigerian 

marriage had since ended. Omorhienrhien and Harris remarried and then submitted a new petition. That effort succeeded, 

and Omorhienrhien received conditional permanent residency in January 2011. 

For an immigrant like Omorhienrhien who relies on his 

marriage to a United States citizen for permanent residency, 

the status comes with conditions, the greatest of which is that 

it lasts for only two years. See 8 U.S.C. § 1186a(a)(1). To remove the conditions, Omorhienrhien had to do two things—

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submit, together with his citizen-spouse, Form I-175 (Petition 

to Remove Conditions on Residence), and then appear with 

his spouse for a personal interview. See id. § 1186a(c)(1). If 

Omorhienrhien did not check both boxes, the Department of 

Homeland Security would terminate his permanent resident 

status two years after he received it. See id. § 1186a(c)(2). 

The problem for Omorhienrhien was that he and Harris 

had already parted ways by the time he filed the petition to 

remove the conditions on his residency. Their divorce became 

final in July 2011, about six months after he obtained conditional permanent resident status. This meant that Harris did 

not join Omorhienrhien in filing the petition and was not 

around to participate in the mandatory personal interview. 

But the law offered Omorhienrhien another way to remove his residency conditions. He could seek a so-called 

hardship waiver. The Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security has the discretion under certain circumstances 

to remove conditions on residency despite an immigrant failing to meet the joint-petition and joint-interview requirements. One of those circumstances is when the immigrant, 

though now divorced, entered into a marriage in good faith. 

See 8 U.S.C. § 1186a(c)(4)(B). Omorhienrhien sought a hardship waiver on that ground when he filed his petition, but 

USCIS denied it in March 2014. 

B

The denial triggered removal proceedings. See 8 C.F.R. 

§ 1216.5(f). In the immigration court, Omorhienrhien requested review of the denial of his petition to remove the conditions on his residency, including the USCIS decision denying him a waiver. The immigration judge held a hearing on 

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the issue in December 2017. The hearing sought to answer the 

question at the center of Omorhienrhien’s request for a hardship waiver—whether he married Harris in good faith and 

not for the purpose of obtaining an immigration benefit. 

Omorhienrhien testified about his relationship with Harris. He explained that he was married in Nigeria but believed 

that the relationship had legally dissolved before he left for 

the United States. Once he arrived, his cousin introduced him 

to a friend, Pretty Hunt, and Omorhienrhien moved into her 

basement. Hunt introduced him to one of her coworkers, 

Linda Harris, and the two began a relationship in July 2008. 

Omorhienrhien proposed to Harris just a few months later so 

that they could live together without running afoul of his religious beliefs. At that point, Harris occasionally stayed with 

Omorhienrhien at Hunt’s home. 

The couple married in December 2008 in a ceremony attended by a few friends. After learning of the Nigerian marriage complication, they remarried in June 2010. Omorhienrhien testified that he loved Harris and married her for that 

reason alone. He added that he lived with Harris in Hunt’s 

home after their first wedding. For some of that time, Harris’s 

daughter and grandsons lived with them. But in March 2011, 

Harris left and later asked for a divorce. Omorhienrhien was 

not certain what spurred the split. 

The government did not buy Omorhienrhien’s account 

and challenged it with documents that seemed to contradict

that he and Harris lived together from December 2008 to 

March 2011. In the decree dissolving his marriage to Harris, 

the issuing court found that the parties “were married on December 2, 2008 and they have been separated since July 2009.” 

When asked for an explanation, Omorhienrhien claimed the 

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dissolution decree was false. But the government had more—

a lease in Harris’s name for March 2010 to the end of February 

2011. The lease not only named her alone (at an address other 

than Hunt’s) but also had appended to it a rental application 

in which Harris stated she was single and expected her only 

visitor to be her grandchild. Omorhienrhien explained this 

discrepancy by positing that Harris probably signed the lease 

for her daughter. 

Two other witnesses testified at the hearing. Both said that 

they had attended Omorhienrhien and Harris’s wedding, had 

seen the couple together at Hunt’s home, and perceived them 

to be a genuine married couple. Omorhienrhien also submitted documents like family photographs, statements from 

friends, and medical records for Harris’s grandchild. 

Following the hearing, the immigration judge found that 

Omorhienrhien had not shown that his marriage was bona 

fide and denied him a waiver of the requirements necessary 

for success on his petition to remove the conditions on residency. In doing so, the judge noted that she believed Omorhienrhien had testified credibly, by which she meant he provided information “to the best of his knowledge and recollection.” From there the judge emphasized inconsistencies in the 

record with respect to Omorhienrhien and Harris’s living arrangement and separation. The judge also found troubling the 

lack of any objective evidence—including, for example, insurance policies, home ownership documents, and travel tickets—demonstrating that Omorhienrhien and Harris married 

with the intent to share a life together. 

Omorhienrhien then sought review by the Board of Immigration Appeals. The Board dismissed the appeal because it 

agreed with the immigration judge that Omorhienrhien had 

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not met his burden to prove that his marriage to Harris was 

in good faith. The Board added a cramped and confused interpretation of the immigration judge’s credibility finding. It 

acknowledged that the judge found Omorhienrhien credible 

but clarified that it did not understand her to credit all of his 

testimony. The Board did not explain how those two things 

could be reconciled.

Omorhienrhien now petitions for our review.

II

A

Congress has imposed tight restraints on our authority to 

review discretionary immigration decisions, generally removing them from our jurisdiction. See 8 U.S.C. 

§ 1252(a)(2)(B)(ii). The Board’s denial of Omorhienrhien’s application for a good-faith marriage waiver is one such decision. See Boadi v. Holder, 706 F.3d 854, 857 (7th Cir. 2013). The 

narrow jurisdiction we do possess extends only to constitutional claims and legal questions. See 8 U.S.C. § 1252(a)(2)(D). 

In that limited endeavor to correct legal errors, we review the 

immigration judge’s opinion as supplemented by the Board’s. 

See Moab v. Gonzales, 500 F.3d 656, 659 (7th Cir. 2007).

Omorhienrhien insists that he raises a question of law—

the immigration judge applied too high a standard of proof. 

All agree that Omorhienrhien bore the burden of proving by 

a preponderance of the evidence that he married Harris in 

good faith, and the immigration judge expressly adopted that 

standard. Omorhienrhien’s point is more subtle. He argues 

that the judge, although saying the preponderance standard 

applied, proceeded to review the evidence and make findings 

under a more demanding standard. While we follow 

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Omorhienrhien’s argument just fine, it comes dangerously 

close to inviting us to step into the forbidden territory of reviewing the immigration judge’s factual determinations. Our 

review must remain more limited: we look only at whether 

the immigration judge applied the correct legal standard. 

B

Omorhienrhien takes his cue from Lara v. Lynch, 789 F.3d 

800 (7th Cir. 2015), where an immigrant succeeded in his 

quest for review under the same argument but different circumstances. Gerardo Hernandez Lara stood in a similar procedural posture as Benjamin Omorhienrhien. Lara had received conditional residency through his wife, a United States 

citizen, and the two jointly filed the petition to remove the 

conditions. See id. at 801–02. Lara’s wife likewise left him before it came time for the couple to fulfill the joint-interview 

requirement. Like Omorhienrhien, Lara then sought a waiver 

of the requirement by showing that his marriage had been in 

good faith. See id. at 802. 

The similarities end there. Lara testified that he married 

his ex-wife because he loved her, and the government did not 

submit any opposing evidence—literally none. See id. at 803. 

The immigration judge nevertheless denied Lara’s petition for 

a waiver, finding that his testimony was neither sufficiently 

detailed nor consistent with some of his documentary evidence. See id. at 804. The judge did not make a credibility determination. On appeal the Board assumed that Lara’s testimony was credible but from there concluded that Lara’s account was itself insufficient to meet the preponderance of evidence standard. See id. 

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When Lara’s case arrived to our court, we granted his petition for review because the Board “applied too high a burden of proof.” Id. Our reasoning was as straightforward as the 

record evidence: with no opposition from the government, 

Lara testified that he married his wife because he loved her—

not to obtain an immigration benefit—and “[i]f, as the Board 

assumed, [Lara] testified truthfully, then this testimony alone 

is enough to prove that his marriage to [his ex-wife] was more 

likely than not bona fide.” Id. We therefore held “[t]he Board’s 

failure to reach that conclusion is a legal error.” Id. at 805. 

C

This case is not Lara. The immigration judge saw two key 

distinctions, and both are spot-on. 

First, unlike in Lara, where the government offered no evidence whatsoever to challenge the legitimacy of the marriage, see id. at 803, here the government presented evidence 

that conflicted with and discredited Omorhienrhien’s testimony. Take, for example, Omorhienrhien’s testimony that he 

and Harris lived together from December 2008 to March 2011. 

The government responded by presenting a lease for an apartment in Harris’s name that began in March 2010, when she 

was supposedly living with Omorhienrhien. The immigration 

judge in Lara’s case had to decide whether his testimony, unchallenged by any objective evidence from the government, 

met the bar for relief. But here the immigration judge weighed 

the evidence and found that contradictory documents undermined Omorhienrhien’s testimony. More to it, the judge determined that absent additional corroborating evidence, 

Omorhienrhien’s testimony fell short of establishing by a preponderance that he married Harris in good faith. We do not 

have the jurisdiction to second-guess that weighing of 

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evidence. See Adebowale v. Mukasey, 546 F.3d 893, 896 (7th Cir. 

2008) (“[A] disagreement with the weight assigned by the immigration courts to particular evidence does not present a 

question of law.”). 

So, too, is there a second difference with Lara. The REAL 

ID Act provides that “[w]here the immigration judge determines that the applicant should provide evidence which corroborates otherwise credible testimony, such evidence must 

be provided unless the applicant demonstrates that the applicant does not have the evidence and cannot reasonably obtain 

the evidence.” 8 U.S.C. § 1229a(c)(4)(B). In Lara, neither the 

Board nor the immigration judge faulted the petitioner for 

failing to come forward with available corroborating evidence. See 789 F.3d at 806. Not so here. 

The immigration judge voiced a concern over “the complete lack of objective evidence” and identified a laundry list 

of documents that might have assuaged the unease—something even as simple as a ticket showing that Omorhienrhien 

and Harris went on a vacation together. Omorhienrhien contends that he had no access to any such evidence. By way of 

example, he states he had an informal living arrangement in 

someone’s basement, leaving him without a lease to give the 

judge. But Omorhienrhien offers no explanation for why he 

could not provide the immigration court with the other specific examples of missing corroborating evidence. The immigration judge thought it surprising, for instance, that Omorhienrhien lacked any evidence from a community or religious 

organization, given that he was a preacher and said he and 

Harris attended church together. On this record, we cannot 

say that the judge’s conclusion that Omorhienrhien lacked 

available corroborating evidence was unreasonable. See 

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8 U.S.C. § 1252(b)(4) (“No court shall reverse a determination 

made by a trier of fact with respect to the availability of corroborating evidence ... unless the court finds ... that a reasonable trier of fact is compelled to conclude that such corroborating evidence is unavailable.”). 

In the end, then, what was true for Lara is not for Omorhienrhien. The immigration judge here applied the correct 

standard of proof, both in word and in substance. Finding no 

legal error and lacking the authority to go beyond that boundary, we DENY the petition for review. 

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