Opinion ID: 3064625
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: The IJ’s failure to make a severity finding

Text: [8] The third and final element needed to establish past per- 4 In discussing the bus-stop incident, the IJ did note that Sinha failed to report what happened to him “to the hospital” where he received medical care for his injuries. But that is a fact of marginal relevance, if any, to determining whether the government was able and willing to protect him. 4580 SINHA v. HOLDER secution is severity — that is, a petitioner must show that the harm he suffered rose to a level of offensiveness “ ‘extreme’ ” enough to be deemed persecution. Ghaly, 58 F.3d at 1431 (citation omitted). Here, too, the IJ’s opinion is difficult to follow. But it appears that the IJ declined to make a finding as to whether the incidents of violence and harassment to which Sinha testified were sufficiently severe to amount to persecution. Rather, the IJ mentioned the severity prong, but subsumed his discussion of that prong in the discussion of the nexus prong. Ultimately, he found that Sinha was not harmed on account of his race, without separately reaching a conclusion as to severity. [9] Even were we to read the IJ’s decision charitably and assume that he did mean to make an independent finding that the attacks on Sinha were not sufficiently severe to meet the definition of persecution, we could only conclude that any such finding rested on an erroneous legal standard — namely, that discriminatory acts cannot be persecution if they are widespread. The IJ suggested as much when he stated that “[t]he Board has indicated unequivocally that [the] hazards of personal injury which arise as a result of conflict between majority and minority ethnic groups is not persecution.” This understanding of the BIA’s precedent is wrong. None of the cases cited by the IJ indicates that the circumstance of widespread ethnic conflict renders the harm an individual applicant suffers somehow less “severe” than it would otherwise be, and thus insufficiently severe to constitute persecution.5 5 In each of the cases the IJ cited, the alien’s asylum claim was rejected for some reason other than the existence of widespread strife — e.g., because the alien failed to make the required nexus showing, because the record did not show the government’s inability or unwillingness to control the violence, or because the alien personally had not suffered sufficiently severe harm. See Matter of Tan, 12 I. & N. Dec. 564, 567 (BIA 1967) (rejecting alien’s claim for withholding of removal because, in light of the facts “that he never experienced persecution prior to his departure from SINHA v. HOLDER 4581 Moreover, this Court has definitively held, more than once, that individual persecution can occur in the context of widespread ethnic violence. See Ndom, 384 F.3d at 752 (“True, the existence of civil war or civil strife in an applicant’s country of origin, by itself, does not establish eligibility for asylum. At the same time, the existence of civil strife does not alter our normal approach to determining refugee status or make a particular asylum claim less compelling.”) (internal citations omitted); Baballah, 367 F.3d at 1077 (“The IJ’s suggestion that the threats and attacks experienced by Baballah and his family cannot be considered persecution because of generally dangerous conditions is at odds with our case law.”). Just as the fact of widespread ethnic violence does not make it harder for an alien to prove a nexus to a protected ground, see Ndom, 384 F.3d at 752, it also does not make it harder for the alien to establish the requisite degree of severity. Baballah, 367 F.3d at 1077. Indonesia” and that the Indonesian police had protected his family’s property from mob violence in the past, he had not shown a sufficient likelihood that he would be victimized by ethnically-motivated mob violence in the future); Matter of V-T-S-, 21 I. & N. Dec. 792, 798-99 (BIA 1997) (“Kidnapping is a very serious offense. Seriousness of conduct, however, is not dispositive in our analysis [of whether the nexus requirement is satisfied]. Instead, the critical issue is whether . . . the motivation for the conduct was to persecute the asylum applicant on account of [a protected ground] . . . . [Here, m]oney was . . . one of the reasons for the kidnapping, and the evidence does not suggest that other motivations existed.”); Ghaly, 58 F.3d at 1431 (holding that “where private discrimination is neither condoned by the state nor the prevailing social norm, it clearly does not amount to ‘persecution’ within the meaning of the Act.”); Prasad v. INS, 47 F.3d 336, 340 (9th Cir. 1995) (holding that general evidence of “poor conditions for, and discrimination against, ethnic Indians” was not sufficient to make out an asylum claim, because “[p]articularized individual persecution, not merely conditions of discrimination in the country of origin, must be shown before asylum will be granted”); Shoaee v. INS, 704 F.2d 1079, 1084 (9th Cir. 1983) (“Shoaee has put forward no concrete evidence to support his contention that he might be persecuted because of his opinions and American associations were he to return to Iran. He has only established that it is likely his family’s political fortunes have declined.”). 4582 SINHA v. HOLDER [10] Our holding in Singh v. INS, 134 F.3d 962 (9th Cir. 1998), is not to the contrary. In Singh, we held that the stoning of an Indo-Fijian petitioner’s home and repeated acts of vandalism on her property, during which the petitioner herself was never physically injured or even credibly threatened with injury, were “not so extreme that [they cumulatively] constitute[ ] persecution.” Id. at 967. Singh explained that Petitioner must establish that the mistreatment she suffered was . . . substantially more grievous in kind or degree than the general manifestation of hostility between the competing ethnic and religious groups in Fiji. Mere generalized lawlessness and violence between diverse populations, of the sort which abounds in numerous countries and inflicts misery upon millions of innocent people daily around the world, generally is not sufficient to permit the Attorney General to grant asylum to everyone who wishes to improve his or her life by moving to the United States without an immigration visa. Id. We do not read this passage to suggest, contrary to our other case law, that an alien who experiences harm that would otherwise rise to the level of persecution must show more or qualitatively worse harm — or, in other words, faces a higher “severity” bar — purely because that harm occurred against a background of generalized ethnic strife. Rather, our understanding of Singh’s holding is that a background of generalized lawlessness is not by itself sufficient to provide any individual petitioner with a successful asylum claim. Singh required the petitioner to show what we called “substantially more grievous [mistreatment] . . . than the general manifestation of hostility,” not because the existence of a general climate of hostility somehow made the petitioner’s burden of proof heavier than it otherwise would be, but because that general climate of hostility was not itself enough to establish that Singh had suffered past persecution. Singh, 134 F.3d at 967. SINHA v. HOLDER 4583 [11] In sum, to the degree the IJ suggested that the fact that Indo-Fijians are frequently the victims of harassment, mistreatment, and worse undercuts the severity of the individualized harm suffered by this particular Indo-Fijian applicant, he erred. But, as it is not clear that the IJ in the end made any severity finding, we decline to make any such determination ourselves. See INS v. Ventura, 537 U.S. 12, 16-17 (2002). Rather, we leave for the agency to decide in the first instance whether the harm that petitioners suffered rose to the level of persecution.6