Opinion ID: 3022069
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: introduction

Text: Petitioner’s father was killed in cold blood, and the 2 government concedes that he is dead. That murder – and what preceded and followed it – is the event on which her application for asylum, withholding of removal, and relief under the Convention Against Torture (“CAT”) was almost exclusively based. In his apparent zeal to deny relief to petitioner, however, the Immigration Judge, Donald V. Ferlise, came to the conclusion that the father is alive. [T]he Court is strongly persuaded and tends to believe that the respondent’s father is indeed alive and is not dead . . . If this is true then the respondent’s entire case dissolves right in front of our eyes . . . . the case is nothing but a fraud that is being perpetrated upon this Court. (App. at 18; see also id. at 19 (“[T]he fact that the respondent’s father is indeed alive . . . is a very, very important issue in this case.”).) In concluding that the father is alive, Judge Ferlise utterly ignored undisputed evidence of the father’s death and shored up his conclusion with evidence he had excluded, evidence that actually corroborated the fact of the father’s death. His conclusion “do[es] not flow in a reasoned way from the evidence of record and [is] . . . arbitrary and conjectural in nature.” Dia v. Ashcroft, 353 F.3d 228, 250 (3d Cir. 2003) (en banc). It is “more puzzling than plausible, more curious than commonsense.” Id. at 251. The petition for review will be granted, and the case will be remanded for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.1