Opinion ID: 6349253
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: The Extreme Deference Required in Immigration

Text: Cases In our review of immigration decisions, three interconnected layers of deference combine to form what should be one of the most deferential standards of review in our legal system. First, the scope of our review is tightly circumscribed by the extraordinarily deferential standard that Congress has commanded—yielding to the agency’s determinations unless a different conclusion is compelled. Second, we apply that extreme deference to the extraordinarily difficult and often indeterminate factual inquiries that the agency alone is charged with making. And third, as the Supreme Court recently reiterated in Dai, the agency enjoys extraordinary discretion in making the difficult determinations of how much credibility, weight, and persuasiveness to afford different parts of the record in reaching its factual conclusions.
In the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), Congress codified the highly deferential substantial evidence test and established what should be our court’s guiding star in the review of immigration decisions: that “administrative findings of fact are conclusive unless any reasonable adjudicator would be compelled to conclude to the contrary.” 34 FLORES MOLINA V. GARLAND INA § 242(b)(4)(B) (codified as 8 U.S.C. § 1252(b)(4)(B) (emphasis added)). Congress later amended the INA by passing the REAL ID Act, further reining in our role and discretion as a reviewing court and stripping federal courts of jurisdiction to hear certain immigration claims. See Nasrallah v. Barr, 140 S. Ct. 1683, 1698 (2020) (Thomas, J., dissenting). Over time, however, this court’s decisions have chipped away at these statutory standards—broadening the scope and standard of our review far beyond the limited and deferential posture that Congress unmistakably set out in the INA. See id. To properly apply our deferential standard of review, we are supposed to scour the record to answer a single question: could any reasonable adjudicator have agreed with the agency’s result, or does the record as a whole compel a different conclusion? See INS v. Elias-Zacarias, 502 U.S. 478, 481 (1992) (explaining that substantial evidence review requires that we review “the record considered as a whole” and reverse the agency only if no reasonable factfinder could agree with its conclusion); see also Prasad v. INS, 47 F.3d 336, 339 (9th Cir. 1995) (describing Elias-Zacarias as “the touchstone” and “definitive statement of ‘substantial evidence’ in the context of . . . factual determinations in asylum cases”). On its face, this is an exceptionally deferential standard of review. But there’s more.
Our deferential standard of review becomes even more significant in light of what our court is tasked with reviewing: agency answers to inherently imprecise and difficult factual inquiries. The factual determinations involved in immigration law are innately indeterminate— difficult to answer quantitatively or reduce to precise legal categorization—which underscores the importance of our FLORES MOLINA V. GARLAND 35 deferential posture and limited role in reviewing agency decisions. I illustrate this with just one example, but others abound. The inquiries at issue in this case—whether Molina’s past hardships constitute “persecution” under the INA or whether his fear of future persecution is “well-founded”—are anything but self-evident and could be answered with a range of reasonable views (any one of which we must defer to if selected by the agency). There is no one objective answer to the questions of whether a petitioner has suffered real past “persecution,” or if his fear of future persecution is “well-founded.” Congress established the relief Molina seeks with the Refugee Act of 1980, which gives the Attorney General discretionary authority to grant asylum to an alien who is unable or unwilling to return to his home country “because of persecution or a well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.” 8 U.S.C. § 1101(a)(42). Unsurprisingly, courts have struggled to articulate what constitutes persecution or a well-founded fear of it, as they are inherently obscurant inquiries left largely undefined by the INA or its implementing regulations. See, e.g., INS v. Cardoza-Fonseca, 480 U.S. 421, 448 (1987) (recognizing “[t]here is obviously some ambiguity in a term like ‘well-founded fear’” left undefined by the Act); Mikhailevitch v. INS, 146 F.3d 384, 389 (6th Cir. 1998) (observing that “[t]he Act provides no definition of ‘persecution’”). Despite this inherent ambiguity—or perhaps more accurately, because of this inherent ambiguity (in order to portray our review of these difficult questions as more objective or unbiased)—our court has latched onto the 36 FLORES MOLINA V. GARLAND concept that a 10% possibility of future persecution constitutes a “well-founded fear” under the statute (when accompanied by a genuine, subjective fear of future persecution). See, e.g., Al-Harbi v. INS, 242 F.3d 882, 888 (9th Cir. 2001) (“[E]ven a ten percent chance of persecution may establish a well-founded fear.”) (citing CardozaFonseca, 480 U.S. at 431). 2 But there are several problems with this artificial threshold. The first is that slapping a percentage threshold on an inherently indeterminate question does not somehow magically make it more determinate, because deciding whether or not someone has a higher than 10% possibility of persecution still remains an entirely qualitative inquiry. By pretending to resolve these questions with numerical exactitude, we are merely masking the nonquantifiable nature of the inquiry. It is a barely disguised rhetorical ploy, and nothing more. Even putting that aside, our 10% test is itself a misreading of Supreme Court precedent. It doesn’t come from the statutory text or any implementing regulation, but from a theoretical scenario from a law journal that the Supreme Court cited in Cardoza Fonseca. It was an academic thought-experiment for considering when a petitioner may have a well-founded fear of future persecution, even when the mathematical possibility of persecution was less than 50%. See Cardoza-Fonseca, 480 U.S. at 448. 2 Because the majority concludes that Molina’s past hardships amount to past persecution, it relies primarily on the rebuttable presumption that arises in favor of a well-founded fear of future persecution without directly examining whether Molina satisfied this 10% threshold. But the example illustrates my point nonetheless. FLORES MOLINA V. GARLAND 37 The Supreme Court found that for a fear to be “well- founded” in support of asylum eligibility there had to be a “reasonable possibility” of future persecution—which it decided (after looking at the statute’s structure, its legislative history, and international law) was something less than the more-likely-than-not standard used in withholding proceedings. Cardoza-Fonseca, 480 U.S. at 427–49. The Court stopped short of filling the statutory gap and declined to dictate a specific percentage of persecution-possibility that would be reasonable and therefore sufficient to establish a well-founded fear—instead leaving it for the agency to fill on a case-by-case basis. See id. at 448. But the Court did offer an example, a hypothetical plucked from a law journal article (published years before Congress passed the statutory language at issue), to illustrate that, if a petitioner’s country of origin was executing one out of every ten adult males, the petitioner could still show a well-founded fear of future persecution even though the mathematical possibility of persecution did not meet the greater than 50% standard used in withholding proceedings. Cardoza-Fonseca, 480 U.S. at 431 (quoting 1A Grahl-Madsen, The Status of Refugees in International Law). Latching onto the Court’s academic musings in Cardoza-Fonseca, our court wasted no time stepping over the agency to fill in the statutory gap with a new categorical rule—just as Justice Scalia had feared— thereby (again) expanding both asylum eligibility and our role beyond that authorized by Congress. See id. at 453 (Scalia, J., concurring); Blanco-Comarribas v. INS, 830 F.2d 1039, 1042 (9th Cir. 1987) (citing Cardoza-Fonesca for the 10% test); Al-Harbi v. INS, 242 F.3d 882, 888 (9th Cir. 2001) (same). Our reliance on this fictitious rule is problematic first and foremost because it finds no basis or support in the statute we are supposedly applying—and therefore expands the 38 FLORES MOLINA V. GARLAND class of petitioners eligible for asylum beyond what Congress authorized. The 10% standard is also problematic because it essentially lowers the bar that petitioners must surpass to establish eligibility for asylum—which, in turn, effectively widens this court’s discretion. Today, under our errant rule, we no longer ask whether the agency has considered what the statute commands (i.e., if the petitioner’s fear of persecution is well-founded), or what the Supreme Court actually ruled in Cardoza-Fonseca (i.e., if the petitioner faces a “reasonable possibility” of persecution). 8 U.S.C. § 1101(a)(42)(A) (emphasis added); Cardoza-Fonseca, 480 U.S. at 440 (emphasis added). Instead, we ask if there is even a marginal, 10% chance that the petitioner may face persecution. Our reliance on these judge-made rules that purport to quantify the unquantifiable questions in immigration law is particularly problematic because it obfuscates what is actually happening: the substitution of our own discretion in place of the marked deference we owe the agency. Immigration cases are both complicated and indeterminate. But our court cannot resist the urge to gloss over these complexities with a quantitative sheen that gives the appearance of a mere technical application of the law when, in reality, this faux quantification only aggrandizes our discretion at the expense of the agency’s. We cannot and should not ignore the fundamental complexities of immigration inquiries—which produce a far wider range of “reasonable” views to which we owe more deference than our precedents suggest. But that’s still not all.
Lastly, it is not only how we are to review agency decisions (with a very limited scope and deferential posture) or what we are reviewing (answers to inherently FLORES MOLINA V. GARLAND 39 indeterminate questions) that undergird the super-deference Congress has commanded we apply. The Supreme Court also recently, and unanimously, reemphasized that Immigration Judges and the BIA enjoy wide discretion in how they arrive at, and articulate, the conclusion and supporting grounds that we review. See Dai, 141 S. Ct. at 1677–81. Before being reversed in Dai, our court followed a selfmade rule that severely limited the agency’s discretion in answering the indeterminate inquiries presented in immigration applications. See id. Our court, in its “deemedtrue-or-credible-rule,” decided that any agency decision issued without an explicit adverse credibility determination must mean that the agency not only found the petitioner’s testimony 100% credible but also gave it 100% weight and found it 100% persuasive. In other words, whatever the agency decided on credibility, so too (we assumed) went the determinations on weight and persuasiveness. This presumption essentially narrowed the agency’s wide discretion to two options: either find the petitioner explicitly noncredible and reject 100% of his testimony, or our court would assume the agency accepted 100% of the petitioner’s testimony as true. See id. In Dai, the Supreme Court stated the obvious: that our judge-made rule was wholly irreconcilable with the INA and had “no proper place in a reviewing court’s analysis.” Id. at 1677. Dai emphasized that in answering the indeterminate and ambiguous inquiries described above, the agency does so with an extraordinary amount of discretion as to how credible, weighty, and persuasive it finds different parts of the record. Id. at 1680–81. In other words, how much weight and persuasive value the agency affords various parts of the record is done on a dial with a range of reasonable 40 FLORES MOLINA V. GARLAND allocations; it does not always follow or correlate to the on/off switch of credibility as our pre-Dai regime wrongly assumed. The agency is afforded this wide discretion not only because of the nature of inquiries being assessed but also because of the practical realities at play in immigration cases. A petitioner’s testimony about what happened in a foreign country is often practically impossible to verify, and petitioners are usually strongly motivated to avoid deportation, which predictably often results in the embellishment of their own past hardships and other testimony. Separating the wheat from the chaff under these conditions is more of an art than a science, which is just one reason why an Immigration Judge may ultimately conclude that an alien is generally credible, but still not give full weight to his testimony. These fact-heavy determinations are complex and murky and present precisely the kind of questions that Congress has entrusted the agency alone to answer. And as Dai illustrated, we are supposed to consider the record as a whole, and diligently search for grounds to affirm the agency’s determination. We are bound to uphold agency decisions, even those of “less than ideal clarity if the agency’s path may be reasonably discerned.” Zamorano v. Garland, 2 F.4th 1213, 1222 (9th Cir. 2021) (quoting Dai, 141 S. Ct. at 1679). The overworked agency is not required to show every step of its work, or “follow a particular formula or incant ‘magic words’” in exercising its discretion. It is not required to disclose exactly what parts of the record it found persuasive or quantify how much of the petitioner’s testimony may have been discounted or even why. See id. Indeed, Dai makes clear that the agency may exercise its wide discretion in making these determinations implicitly, FLORES MOLINA V. GARLAND 41 and we must consider this possibility in searching through the record for support of the agency’s decision. See Dai, 141 S. Ct. at 1680–81. 3 3 Recognizing the difficulty in justifying the majority’s decision under substantial evidence review, Judge Korman’s separate concurrence proposes a solution both simple and elegant: just don’t defer. The concurrence acknowledges a divide within our circuit (and amongst the circuits) as to what standard of review should apply when determining whether certain facts constitute persecution, and expresses a preference for characterizing them as legal questions that we review de novo. Judge Korman argues for de novo review because “the BIA did not base its past persecution finding on a rejection of the veracity of Flores Molina’s description of his past experiences [i.e., an explicit adverse credibility determination]. Rather, the BIA held that Flores Molina’s ‘claimed past harm, cumulatively considered, does not rise to the level of past persecution.’” But Judge Korman seems to have missed the Supreme Court’s clear message in Dai. As explained above, Dai unmistakably directed that when reviewing agency decisions, even if no adverse credibility determination was explicitly made, we must account for the possibility that the agency did not give every factual assertion made by the petitioner full weight or persuasive value. Converting every question of what facts constitute persecution into a legal one that we review de novo does not allow for this possibility because it wrongly assumes the agency found a petitioner’s version of facts fully persuasive. Here, as in other cases where the agency did not explicitly reject the veracity of a petitioner’s testimony, we don’t know if the agency discounted Molina’s factual account of his past experiences. De novo review, as Judge Korman would prefer, cannot account for this possibility. Nor can Judge Korman avoid Dai by attempting to constrain its implications to only those cases that present a wholly “different set of facts than the one put forward by” the petitioner. The Supreme Court in Dai repeatedly chastised our court for failing to consider whether the agency had implicitly determined that some of the evidence in that case was “outweighed” by other facts in the record. Dai, 141 S. Ct. at 1681. Dai thus requires us to consider whether the agency may have implicitly given reduced weight to some of the facts in the record vis-à-vis others, and if so, defer to the agency’s conclusion. There is no way to do that under Judge Korman’s de novo approach—it is, in fact, just our old, 42 FLORES MOLINA V. GARLAND