Opinion ID: 2996381
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Georgis’s Petition for Asylum and Withhold-

Text: ing of Deportation We review decisions of the immigration courts to deny petitions for asylum and withholding of deportation for substantial evidence. Ambati v. Reno, 233 F.3d 1054, 1059 (7th Cir. 2000). We must affirm the BIA’s decision if it is supported by “reasonable, substantial, and probative evidence on the record considered as a whole,” Useinovic v. INS, 313 F.3d 1025, 1029 (7th Cir. 2002), and we are not at liberty to overturn the agency’s determination “simply because [we] would have decided the case differently,” Yadegar-Sargis v. INS, 297 F.3d 596, 601 (7th Cir. 2002). Only where the evidence in support of the application is “so compelling that no reasonable fact-finder could fail to find the requisite fear of persecution” will we reverse the Board’s decision for lack of evidence. INS v. Elias-Zacarias, 502 U.S. 478, 484 (1992). While our review of the IJ’s credibility determinations is highly deferential, Nasir v. INS, 122 F.3d 484, 486 (7th Cir. 1997), we will not automatically yield to the IJ’s conclusions when they are drawn from insufficient or incomplete evidence. In this case the IJ denied Georgis’s request for asylum and withholding of deportation because he found her claims incredible due to “numerous discrepancies” in her asylum application and her hearing testimony. The IJ gave six reasons for his conclusion that Georgis’s claims were neither “internally consistent” nor “inherently persuasive,” quoted several passages from the State Department’s generalized profile of asylum applications and country conditions in Ethiopia for 1997, and summarily denied Georgis’s request for asylum or withholding of deportation. Of the six reasons given by the IJ, three specifically relate to discrepancies in 10 No. 02-2786 dates that Georgis explained at the hearing were due to her unfamiliarity with our calendar versus the Ethiopian calendar; one involves the specificity and extent of Georgis’s knowledge of her son’s whereabouts; one concerns the lack of corroborating or supporting evidence relating to Georgis’s AAPO membership, her and her family’s political activities and arrests and persecution by the Ethiopian government, and her husband’s arrest and prolonged imprisonment; and one addresses Georgis’s failure to discuss the events relating to her 1993 arrest at the trial of Professor Woldeyes in her asylum application. In the context of the entire administrative record, these six reasons alone are insufficient to support the IJ’s decision to discredit Georgis’s testimony. On appeal Georgis argues, and the government acknowledges, that at least four of the IJ’s given reasons are minor inconsistencies which are easily resolved by other facts in evidence. For instance, the IJ found Georgis’s testimony that she was arrested “at the trial of Professor Woldeyes on September 20, 1993,” to be inconsistent with the State Department’s report “that Professor Woldeyes was convicted on June 27, 1994.” But obviously, the time of trial is different from the time of conviction, and the government admits that the record does not indicate when Professor Woldeyes’s trial began or ended. The IJ also found the statement in Georgis’s application that “her son Minase is still in jail” to be inconsistent with her later testimony “that his whereabouts are unknown.” We are not convinced these statements are inconsistent, but even if they are, the government concedes that Georgis seemed to have believed when she submitted her application that Minase was in jail but was later informed by her daughter Frehiwot that his whereabouts were unknown. Finally, the IJ’s reliance on Georgis’s “inconsistent” testimony regarding various dates, including the date of her husband’s arrest and the date of a letter written by her daughter Frehiwot, is unconvincing given that Georgis No. 02-2786 11 repeatedly expressed her confusion regarding the differences between the Ethiopian and Gregorian calendars. The transcript of the hearing reveals that everyone, and not just Georgis, seemed unclear about converting the dates from Ethiopian to Gregorian. Moreover, each time Georgis was asked to clarify a date, she tried to place the event in question in its proper chronology even if she could not calculate the correct date in our calendar system. We agree with Georgis’s assertion and the government’s concession that these four inconsistences should be treated as minor. Thus, of the six reasons why the IJ found Georgis not credible, there remain two that we must review for substantial evidence. One is that the record did not “contain corroborative or supporting evidence relating to the respondent’s alleged AAPO membership, the political activities or arrests of the respondent or her relatives, or her husband’s alleged detention.” We do not find this explanation persuasive for a number of reasons. As an initial matter, it is not necessary for an asylum applicant to submit corroborating evidence in order to sustain her burden of proof. 8 C.F.R. § 208.13(a) (“The testimony of the applicant, if credible, may be sufficient to sustain the burden of proof without corroboration.”). More importantly, however, Georgis did submit corroborating evidence. The IJ received into evidence and marked as “Exhibit 2” a translated version of Frehiwot’s letter, which stated that Afework had not been released following his arrest but remained in the central prison. Also submitted by Georgis and included as Exhibit 2 was a letter from the chairperson of the AAPO Support Group in Chicago, Illinois, confirming that Georgis was an active member in the organization. Further, Georgis attempted to submit a letter from the Ethiopian Transitional Government Second Police Station that corroborated the facts related to Afework’s arrest, but the IJ excluded the letter because it was not submitted in advance of the hearing date, was not 12 No. 02-2786 properly certified, and because no translation was provided with the Government’s copy of the document (although a translation was provided to the IJ and the government had access to it). As discussed earlier, we are uncertain whether the letter qualifies as an “official record” within the meaning of 8 C.F.R. § 287.6, but even if it does, § 287.6 is not the only way that Georgis could authenticate the document. See Khan v. INS, 237 F.3d 1143, 1144 (9th Cir. 2001) (“documents may be authenticated in immigration proceedings through any recognized procedure, such as those required by INS regulation or by the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure”). In Khan the Ninth Circuit held that it was error to exclude documents verifying the petitioner’s testimony that he had been arrested and detained for lack of certification when the denial of asylum was based in part on the lack of corroborating evidence. Id. at 1144. Here, under nearly identical factual circumstances, we agree with the Ninth Circuit that it was error for the IJ to exclude the letter from the Ethiopian Transitional Government Second Police Station since the IJ expressly stated that it was for lack of corroborating evidence like this letter that he found Georgis not credible and denied her asylum application. The remaining reason why the IJ discredited Georgis’s claims was that her asylum application did not mention that she had been arrested and beaten in September 1993 for demonstrating in support of Professor Woldeyes, nor did it mention that her uncle had been killed due to those demonstrations. Specifically, Item 4 of the application asked whether Georgis “or any member of [her] family [had] ever been mistreated/threatened by the authorities.” Item 5 then asked if Georgis “or any member of [her] family [had] ever been arrested, detained, interrogated, convicted and sentenced, or imprisoned.” While citing other, more recent examples of the persecution of her family members by the Ethiopian government, Georgis did not mention the September 1993 events in response to either of these quesNo. 02-2786 13 tions. At her hearing Georgis explained that the reason she did not mention the 1993 arrest in response to Item No. 5 was because she did not believe that “the incident would count as imprisonment. In my mind what imprisonment I thought that it’s in the central prison for longer terms and all that. That’s why I didn’t really mention it.” She further explained that she did not bring up the incident in response to Item No. 4 because “it is a short term and short time, I thought it was not much relevance for the case. . . . I didn’t mention it is because it’s a past case. I didn’t thought that it’s going to help my case. I thought that the current situation that I have, my children’s and my husband problem, that’s what I emphasized it more than what happened to me.” The IJ thought that this explanation did “not appear to be an adequate justification for failing to include an incident which could be viewed as past persecution.” Although we consider Georgis’s reasons plausible, we recognize that it is the role of the IJ and not this reviewing court to decide whether her explanation justified her omitting the incident from her asylum application. However, having found that the other five reasons given by the IJ for discrediting Georgis are either unsupported by the evidence in the record or based on incomplete or improperly excluded evidence, we are not inclined to defer to his credibility determination on this remaining sixth ground alone.