Opinion ID: 4511499
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Our Threat Cases in the Context of Broader

Text: Precedent As a general matter, we have described “persecution” as including “treatment like death threats, involuntary confinement, [and] torture” that rises to the level of a “severe affront[] to the life or freedom of the applicant.” GomezZuluaga, 527 F.3d at 341. To determine whether a set of experiences rises to the level of a “severe affront[] to the life or freedom of the applicant,” id., the “cumulative effect of the applicant’s experience must be taken into account because [t]aking isolated incidents out of context may be misleading.” Fei Mei Cheng v. Att’y Gen., 623 F.3d 175, 192 (3d Cir. 2010) (alteration in original) (internal quotation marks and citation omitted). “[M]istreatment amount[ing] to persecution” may be “actual or threatened,” and “[e]ven if one incident of mistreatment is not, in and of itself, severe enough to constitute persecution, a series of incidents of physical or economic mistreatment could, taken together, be sufficiently abusive to amount to persecution.” Id. at 192–93. Pursuant to this principle, each incident must be “weigh[ed] . . . in conjunction with . . . prior incidents,” Toure v. Att’y Gen., 443 F.3d 310, 318 (3d Cir. 2006), and “assessed within the ‘overall trajectory of the harassment,’” Fei Mei Cheng, 623 F.3d at 193 (quoting Gomez-Zuluaga, 527 F.3d at 343). We have had three occasions to consider the significance of threats in making that assessment. The first was Zhen Hua Li v. Attorney General, where we considered whether verbal threats, “standing alone,” constituted past persecution. See 400 F.3d at 164–65. In that case, government 8 officials threatened that the petitioner would be captured and beaten for violating China’s one-child policy. Id. at 164. As a threshold matter, we noted that this threat was “unfulfilled” because the petitioner was never actually captured or beaten. Id. We then observed that, to constitute past persecution, unfulfilled threats must be “of a highly . . . menacing nature” as well as “sufficiently imminent or concrete,” id. at 164–65 (citing Boykov v. INS, 109 F.3d 413, 416–17 (7th Cir. 1997)), and that the threat in that case—uncorroborated by the surrounding circumstances—fell short: “neither [petitioner] nor any of [his] family members were actually . . . physically harmed,” and petitioner’s only evidence that the threat was more than bluster was that one worker at a neighboring factory had allegedly been arrested and beaten for violating the onechild policy. Id. By contrast, in Chavarria v. Gonzalez, the petitioner did suffer past persecution when he was threatened within the surrounding context of violent conduct. 446 F.3d at 519–20. An initial incident in which paramilitary troops simply surveilled the petitioner’s home was not a “concrete and menacing” threat, id., but that threshold was crossed when armed men forced the petitioner into a car, robbed him at gunpoint, and threatened to kill him if they ever saw him again. Id. at 520. Together, these experiences constituted past persecution because the petitioner had not experienced a “merely verbal” threat but a threat that, in the context of the surrounding mistreatment, was sufficiently substantiated for petitioner to “suffer[] harm.” Id. We described a threat meeting that threshold as “concrete and menacing.” Id. In our third threat case—Gomez-Zuluaga v. Attorney General—we built on Chavarria to hold that a threat was sufficiently concrete and menacing when substantiated by both 9 contemporaneous physical violence and by the petitioner’s previous encounters with her persecutors. See 527 F.3d at 342–34. The first two incidents—during which guerrillas verbally threatened the petitioner at gunpoint during a “brief” detention, the petitioner “was not physically injured or robbed,” and “the guns were [not] brandished or used in . . . [a] threatening manner,” id. at 342—were “more similar to the situation in Li, where the threats were oblique and not imminent, and the petitioner was not appreciably harmed.” Id. But the third and final incident—in which the petitioner was abducted, confined for eight days while blindfolded and bound, and threatened repeatedly—did rise to the level of persecution. Id. Taking into account both the contemporaneous abduction and the previous threats and looking to the “overall trajectory of the harassment against [the petitioner],” we held the final threat sufficiently “concrete and menacing” to constitute past persecution. Id. at 342–43. From Chavarria, Zhen Hua Li, and Gomez-Zuluaga, we draw three lessons. First, our threat cases are not an exception to the general rule of cumulative analysis but simply applications of it. In Zhen Hua Li, the lack of any corroborating harm to the petitioner or those close to him generally was dispositive, 400 F.3d at 165; in Chavarria, the threat was made concrete by the violent context in which it occurred, 446 F.3d at 520; and in Gomez-Zuluaga, the final threat was substantiated by the “overall trajectory” of the petitioner’s mistreatment, 527 F.3d at 343. Second, in evaluating whether a threat within that “overall trajectory” suffices to establish persecution, we consider whether the threat is “concrete” and “menacing.” True, we have sometimes used the phrase “highly imminent, concrete and menacing,” Chavarria, 446 F.3d at 520 10 (emphasis added), but more frequently we have used the terms “concrete” and “imminent” interchangeably or in the disjunctive—describing a threat amounting to persecution as “menacing” and “sufficiently imminent or concrete,” Zhen Hua Li, 400 F.3d at 164–65 (emphasis added); GomezZuluaga, 527 F.3d at 341 (emphasis added). And on inspection, that is with good reason: “Imminence” is a misnomer here. We have neither required that the threat portend immediate harm nor that it be in close temporal proximity to other acts of mistreatment. See infra Section III.B.2. Indeed, our interest is not the imminence of the threat at all, but rather the likelihood of the harm threatened—a concept subsumed in the inquiry as to whether the threat is “concrete.” We therefore refer to the standard going forward simply as “concrete and menacing.” Third, our cases teach that “concrete and menacing” is not a unique persecution standard for threat cases, but rather a term that reflects the court’s ultimate determination that the cumulative effect of the threat and its corroboration presents a “real threat to [a petitioner’s] life or freedom,” Chang v. INS, 119 F.3d 1055, 1066 (3d Cir. 1997). A threat is “concrete” when it is “not abstract or ideal,” Concrete, Merriam-Webster Unabridged, https://unabridged.merriam- webster.com/unabridged/concrete (last visited Feb. 5, 2020), but is corroborated by credible evidence, see, e.g., GomezZuluaga, 527 F.3d at 343 (finding a threat corroborated by “[t]he overall trajectory of the harassment against [the petitioner]”). And a threat is “menacing” where it “show[s] . . . intention to inflict harm,” see Menace, Merriam-Webster Unabridged, https://unabridged.merriam- webster.com/unabridged/menace (last visited Feb. 5, 2020). See, e.g., Chavarria, 446 F.3d at 520 (finding a threat 11 “menacing” because the petitioner was threatened with death at gunpoint). Thus, a threat is “concrete and menacing,” constituting past persecution, where the aggregate effect of a petitioner’s experiences, including or culminating in the threat in question, placed a petitioner’s life in peril or created an atmosphere of fear so oppressive that it severely curtailed the petitioner’s liberty. In short, a threat that is “concrete and menacing” is simply one that—considered in the context of the full record—poses a “severe affront[] to the [petitioner’s] life or freedom.” Gomez-Zuluaga, 527 F.3d at 341. With these principles in mind, we turn now to the analyses of the IJ and BIA.