Opinion ID: 3167560
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: The Alleged Beating — The Cousin’s Injury

Text: The Board’s order also emphasized, as did the IJ, that the Maroufs’ application and testimony variously referred to Nancy’s cousin as having his hand, arm, or shoulder injured during the same incident when Saed was allegedly beaten. A.R. 4, A.R. 82. Paraphrasing the Maroufs’ testimony and then offering his credibility conclusions, the IJ put it thusly: They beat me on the nose, they drug me outside, and they hurt Nancy’s cousin. They broke his shoulder. Of course, in her asylum application and in the statement attached to this respondent’s withholding application, they claimed that the arm was broken, but in the prior testimony, the respondent’s wife testified that they broke his hand. So they cannot keep straight the number of people involved and what happened to the cousin. No. 14-4136 Marouf, et al. v. Lynch Page 12 Id. Once again, the IJ raised the alleged inconsistencies only in his order denying relief, A.R. 82, having afforded the Maroufs no opportunity during their testimony to address or explain them. There was only one reference to Nancy’s cousin’s injury in the Maroufs’ asylum application, stating his arm was broken. A.R. 727. The subsequent allegedly inconsistent references to a hand or shoulder injury occurred during testimony, when a different translator (the court translator) was translating. A.R. 159, 395. Importantly, all the references to Nancy’s cousin’s injury were made through translation, thus the IJ should have been “sensitive to misunderstandings caused by language barriers, the use of translators, and cultural differences.” Reyes-Cardona, 565 F. App’x at 367. What may have seemed like a series of inconsistencies at the time could have been revealed through further inquiry to be the result of translational difficulties. Indeed, in colloquial Palestinian Arabic the same word can be used to mean both arm and hand. J. Elihay, The Olive Tree: A Transliterated Dictionary of Conversational Eastern Arabic (Palestinian) 213 (2004). It is also easy to imagine that an upper-arm injury could be referred to as either an injury of the shoulder or arm (which could then be translated as a hand injury). And lastly, the Maroufs never indicated that the cousin suffered only one injury; it is possible that any apparent inconsistencies merely reflected the fact that the cousin suffered multiple injuries. As such, the alleged inconsistencies regarding Nancy’s cousin’s injury also “provide[] inadequate justification” for an adverse credibility determination because “there is a strong indication [they] result[ed] from translation errors or language-based misunderstanding . . . .” Ilunga, 777 F.3d at 207-08. The alleged inconsistencies concerning Nancy’s cousin’s injury do not rise to the level of substantial evidence that can support an adverse credibility determination.