Opinion ID: 6349253
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Inherently Indeterminate Inquiries

Text: 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.