Opinion ID: 176718
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Resistance

Text: As an initial point, there can be no doubt that Cheng resisted China's population control policies (and, as we have noted, the Board assumed as much). In In re M-F-W- & L-G-, the BIA explained that actions that thwart the goals of the [population control] plan and [are] viewed with disfavor by Chinese officials implementing the plan constitute resistance under § 1101(a)(42), even if the actions are not forceful. 24 I. & N. Dec. at 638. Cheng repeatedly refused to comply with multiple officials' increasingly strenuous demands that she abort her first pregnancy, provoking fur[y], escalating threats, and various enforcement actions on the part of the officials. (App. at 736.) Cheng fled the township to have her baby, defied orders that she undergo a sterilization procedure, had to be dragged to the clinic to have the IUD inserted, and missed multiple gynecological appointments. Her actions were significantly more defiant of China's family planning policies than were the more limited actions held to constitute resistance in In re M-F-W- & L-G-. Although the Government did not make the point in its brief, at oral argument, it appeared for the first time to suggest that Cheng's resistance to the officials' demands that she undergo an abortion was not resistance to a coercive population control program within the meaning of the INA because Cheng was unmarried at the time when her acts of resistance transpired. 8 U.S.C. § 1101(a)(42). The Government argues that China's laws forbidding unmarried couples from procreating are not part of a population control program, but are instead aimed at preventing people from having illegitimate children, and so Cheng's resistance was to China's illegitimacy laws, not its population control laws. Id. We reject this singularly unpersuasive contention. The Country Report prepared by the State Department addresses asylum claims based upon China's National Marriage Law (which proscribes procreation by unmarried couples) under the umbrella of claims based on population policies  and claims based on coercive family planning.  [9] (App. at 442 (capitalization omitted, emphasis added).) The Report thus indicates that the restriction on procreation by unmarried couples is a component of China's population control regime, and the Government has identified no evidence supporting a contrary conclusion. [10] Moreover, the Report's treatment of the National Marriage Law as part and parcel of the population control program is eminently sensible. China's one-child-per-couple policy is well-known, ( id. at 443), and it would obviously undermine the population control program if married Chinese couples were held to a one-child limit but unmarried couples could procreate without restriction. In sum, China's prohibition on procreation by unmarried couples is undeniably part of the population control program, and the uncontradicted evidence conclusively establishes that Cheng resisted that program. [11]