United States Court of Appeals 

For the Seventh Circuit 

Chicago, Illinois 60604 

Argued February 27, 2019 

Decided March 26, 2019 

Before 

DIANE P. WOOD, Chief Judge 

WILLIAM J. BAUER, Circuit Judge 

ILANA DIAMOND ROVNER, Circuit Judge 

No. 18-2392 

LOVERT TCHOUGOUE 

 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. A213-089-410 

O R D E R 

Lovert Tchougoue, a 22-year-old citizen of Cameroon, petitions for review of the 

Board of Immigration Appeals’ denial of his application for asylum after he was beaten 

by police for protesting government policies that have violently divided Francophones 

and Anglophones. An immigration judge denied relief, finding that Tchougoue was not 

credible and failed to corroborate his claim of political persecution sufficiently. The 

NONPRECEDENTIAL DISPOSITION 

To be cited only in accordance with Fed. R. App. P. 32.1 
No. 18-2392 Page 2 

Board assumed that Tchougoue was credible, but affirmed the denial of relief on 

grounds that he had not established persecution. Because the Board applied the wrong 

legal standard to Tchougoue’s claim, we grant the petition for review and remand the 

case for further proceedings. 

 Tchougoue’s asylum claim arises from his involvement in protests against the 

Cameroon government over the dominance of the French language in the Anglophone 

region of northwest Cameroon. The increasingly violent conflict between Anglophones 

and the Francophone majority began in late 2016 when teachers and lawyers in the 

Anglophone regions, including Tchougoue’s hometown of Bamenda, went on strike for 

months to protest their marginalization and forced assimilation by the Francophone 

government. See e.g., U.S. Department of State, 2018 Human Rights Report: Cameroon 

1–2. The government responded by arresting and killing protesters, and the crackdown 

spawned a violent, secessionist movement demanding an independent Anglophone 

state called Ambazonia. Id. at 1, 3, 9-10. In search of separatists, the government burned 

homes in the country’s Anglophone regions, and indiscriminately killed civilians, 

causing hundreds of thousands of Anglophones to flee from Cameroon’s Englishspeaking northwest and southwest regions. Id. at 15, 22-23; see also U.S. Concerned over 

Uptick in Violence in Cameroon, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE (Nov. 6, 2018), 

https://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2018/11/287178.htm. 

 In 2016, when he was a university student in Bamenda, Tchougoue joined a 

student protest of the government’s use of French in schools. He was arrested by police 

on November 11, 2016,1 and taken to prison. The police accused him of being a leader 

of the protests and, for two days, held him in a cell and repeatedly beat, slapped, and 

kicked him, leaving scars on his body and back. Tchougoue managed to escape and fled 

to his grandmother’s village ten kilometers away. 

 For the next six months, Tchougoue hid at his grandmother’s house. But on May 

23, 2017, upon venturing to a store, he was picked up by another police officer, who, 

accusing Tchougoue of being a leader of the student protest, arrested him, beat him, 

slapped him, and forced him into a police car. Again Tchougoue escaped, jumping out 

of the police car before he arrived at prison. Tchougoue later contacted his mother, who 

 

1 Tchougoue testified at his hearing that police arrested him in 2017, but in his 

appeal to the Board he corrected himself and wrote that he meant to say 2016. For 

purposes of its decision, the Board assumed “without deciding” that the correction was 

true. 
No. 18-2392 Page 3 

told him that police had come to the house looking for him. He then returned to his 

apartment in Bamenda to collect his things and found his apartment in disarray—

presumably the aftermath of a police search. 

 Tchougoue scooped up his bags and trekked on foot for ten days until he 

reached Nigeria. He worked there for two months to gather funds, flew to Ecuador, and 

then via Mexico entered the United States. At the California border, he applied for 

admission to the United States without a visa and was detained. He remains detained at 

a facility in Chicago. 

 A month after his entry, the Department of Homeland Security served him with 

a notice to appear in removal proceedings for his entry without a visa. At a later hearing 

before the immigration judge, Tchougoue applied for asylum, withholding of removal, 

and protection under the Convention Against Torture (CAT). (Tchougoue now 

proceeds only on his asylum claim.) The IJ told Tchougoue about the importance of 

corroborating evidence to support his application, and scheduled another hearing a 

month later. 

At the next hearing, the IJ denied all of Tchougoue’s applications. The IJ found 

that Tchougoue’s testimony was neither plausible nor believable; that even if he had 

testified credibly, the alleged harm did not rise to the level of persecution; that he had 

not sufficiently corroborated his claims; and that any fear of future persecution he had 

was not objectively reasonable. 

 Tchougoue appealed to the Board, which upheld the IJ’s decision. Though the 

Board assumed (without deciding) that Tchougoue had testified credibly, it concluded 

that his past experiences—albeit “distinctly unpleasant”—“did not reach the level of 

‘persecution.’” In reaching this conclusion, the Board analogized Tchougoue’s situation 

to cases in which we held that the record “did not compel [the] conclusion” of 

persecution. Without corroboration, the Board added, Tchougoue could not establish a 

well-founded fear of persecution. 

Tchougoue opens his petition by challenging the IJ’s adverse credibility 

determination on grounds that it relied upon minor inconsistencies that were 

reasonably explainable. In particular, he contends that the IJ wrongly discredited him 

for inadvertently misstating the year of his arrest and for not adding more details about 

his detention. Although we note that the grounds for the credibility ruling are thin and 

the inconsistencies trivial, we can assume for purposes of our review that Tchougoue is 
No. 18-2392 Page 4 

credible: when he appealed this issue to the Board, the Board assumed—without 

deciding—that Tchougoue was credible, and we will operate from the same 

assumption. See Sibanda v. Holder, 778 F.3d 676, 679 (7th Cir. 2015). 

Tchougoue asserts that the IJ erred in requiring additional corroborative 

evidence because the IJ failed to specify what evidence he would have liked to have 

seen and whether the evidence was readily obtainable or reasonably available. In his 

oral ruling, the IJ found that Tchougoue “offered no corroborating evidence.” But 

Tchougoue does not develop this point and, in any case, the IJ may require 

corroborating evidence under the REAL ID Act, see 8 U.S.C. § 1158(b)(1)(B)(ii), even if 

the applicant is credible, as long as that evidence is reasonably available. See Raphael 

v. Mukasey, 533 F.3d 521, 527 (7th Cir. 2008). Neither the IJ nor Tchougoue discussed 

whether the evidence was reasonably available (and arguably it was not given 

Tchougoue’s escape, abrupt flight from Cameroon, his instant detention in the U.S., and 

his prompt immigration hearing). But Tchougoue did not demonstrate that 

corroborative evidence was reasonably unavailable, as was his burden to do so. Id. 

at 529. 

 

Tchougoue’s stronger argument is that the Board applied the wrong legal 

standard when it relied on our precedent to define what type of conduct constitutes 

persecution. The Board made this mistake, he says, by improperly analogizing his 

experiences to those of other petitioners in cases in which we concluded that the harm 

did not reach the level of persecution: 

Assuming the respondent’s credibility, we conclude that his past 

experiences in Cameroon, while distinctly unpleasant, did not reach the 

level of “persecution.” See Orellana-Arias v. Sessions, 865 F.3d 476, 487 

(7th Cir. 2017) (explaining that under the Seventh Circuit law, “minor 

injuries . . ., albeit traumatic, do not rise to the level of persecution,” and 

collecting cases so holding); see also Mekhtiev v. Holder, 559 F.3d 725, 729–30 

(7th Cir. 2009) (finding that one overnight detention and beating was not 

severe enough to constitute persecution); Mema v. Gonzales, 474 F.3d 412, 

416–18 (7th Cir. 2007) (holding that abduction at gunpoint followed by 

detention and physical abuse, resulting in petitioner losing consciousness, 

did not compel conclusion that petitioner suffered past persecution); 

Dandan v. Ashcroft, 339 F.3d 567, 573–74 (7th Cir. 2003) (holding that record 

did not compel conclusion that petitioner suffered persecution based on a 

single incident where he was detained and deprived of food for three days 
No. 18-2392 Page 5 

and “beaten to the extent that his face became ‘swollen,’” because petitioner 

needed to provide more detail). 

He is correct—the Board conflated our deferential standard with its own by 

improperly relying on our case law to conclude that Tchougoue’s experiences did not 

reach the level of past persecution. Our standard of judicial review is whether the 

evidence compels a finding of past persecution while the Board’s administrative review 

is whether the applicant actually has shown past persecution—a less demanding 

standard that requires the agency to apply its expert judgment in the first instance. 

See Sobaleva v. Holder, 760 F.3d 592, 597–98 (7th Cir. 2014); Sirbu v. Holder, 718 F.3d 655, 

658–60 (7th Cir. 2013); Yasinskyy v. Holder, 724 F.3d 983, 989 (7th Cir. 2013). When the 

agency abdicates this responsibility by treating our deferential standard as the 

substantive standard, it “turns the system upside down” by unfairly ratcheting up the 

standard and applying a circular logic. Plaza-Ramirez v. Sessions, 908 F.3d 282, 285 n.1 

(7th Cir. 2018); Yasinskyy, 724 F.3d at 989. The Board’s “reliance on a simple comparison 

to our cases disregarded the fact that when we apply deferential judicial review, we 

‘expect the immigration judge and the Board to exercise their independent judgment 

and expertise in deciding whether the abuse of an applicant for asylum rose to the level 

of persecution.’” Sobaleva, 760 F.3d at 597 (quoting Sirbu, 718 F.3d at 658.) The Board’s 

boilerplate summary—on top of its assumption that Tchougoue testified credibly—

reflects no independent judgment or expertise. Remand is necessary so that 

Tchougoue’s evidence of past persecution can be evaluated under the proper standard. 

Also problematic in the IJ’s and Board’s decisions is that neither gave adequate 

consideration to the content of Tchougoue’s testimony. Even if Tchougoue cannot 

establish past persecution (and thereby is ineligible for the presumption that he has a 

well-founded fear of future persecution), he can establish a fear of future persecution if 

the fear is subjectively genuine and objectively reasonable. See Diallo v. Ashcroft, 

381 F.3d 687, 699 (7th Cir. 2004). The IJ and the Board found that he faltered on the 

objective test by not presenting sufficiently detailed evidence, but this finding ignored 

Tchougoue’s testimony about the political unrest and his repeated encounters with the 

police. In his testimony—which, again, the Board assumed to be credible—Tchougoue 

said that he was arrested because he joined a student protest on November 11, 2016 

after teachers and lawyers took to the streets to protest the government’s language 

policies; that he endured two episodes of police beatings because of his involvement in 

the protests; that the police had tracked down his mother’s home to inquire about him 

and searched his own apartment; and that he went into hiding for half a year out of fear 

of the police before being apprehended and beaten again on May 23, 2017. If this 
No. 18-2392 Page 6 

testimony is deemed sufficiently persuasive and detailed, it can satisfy his burden of 

proof, even without corroboration. See Xiang v. Lynch, 845 F.3d 306, 309 (7th Cir. 2017). 

Because the Board (1) erroneously applied the wrong legal standard to determine 

whether Tchougoue experienced persecution and (2) failed to consider all of 

Tchougoue’s testimony, we grant the petition for review and remand the case to the 

Board so that it can evaluate, in the first instance, whether Tchougoue established 

persecution.