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

Heading: Extraordinary Agency Discretion

Text: Lastly, it is not only how we are to review agency decisions (with a very limited scope and deferential posture) or what we are reviewing (answers to inherently FLORES MOLINA V. GARLAND 39 indeterminate questions) that undergird the super-deference Congress has commanded we apply. The Supreme Court also recently, and unanimously, reemphasized that Immigration Judges and the BIA enjoy wide discretion in how they arrive at, and articulate, the conclusion and supporting grounds that we review. See Dai, 141 S. Ct. at 1677–81. Before being reversed in Dai, our court followed a selfmade rule that severely limited the agency’s discretion in answering the indeterminate inquiries presented in immigration applications. See id. Our court, in its “deemedtrue-or-credible-rule,” decided that any agency decision issued without an explicit adverse credibility determination must mean that the agency not only found the petitioner’s testimony 100% credible but also gave it 100% weight and found it 100% persuasive. In other words, whatever the agency decided on credibility, so too (we assumed) went the determinations on weight and persuasiveness. This presumption essentially narrowed the agency’s wide discretion to two options: either find the petitioner explicitly noncredible and reject 100% of his testimony, or our court would assume the agency accepted 100% of the petitioner’s testimony as true. See id. In Dai, the Supreme Court stated the obvious: that our judge-made rule was wholly irreconcilable with the INA and had “no proper place in a reviewing court’s analysis.” Id. at 1677. Dai emphasized that in answering the indeterminate and ambiguous inquiries described above, the agency does so with an extraordinary amount of discretion as to how credible, weighty, and persuasive it finds different parts of the record. Id. at 1680–81. In other words, how much weight and persuasive value the agency affords various parts of the record is done on a dial with a range of reasonable 40 FLORES MOLINA V. GARLAND allocations; it does not always follow or correlate to the on/off switch of credibility as our pre-Dai regime wrongly assumed. The agency is afforded this wide discretion not only because of the nature of inquiries being assessed but also because of the practical realities at play in immigration cases. A petitioner’s testimony about what happened in a foreign country is often practically impossible to verify, and petitioners are usually strongly motivated to avoid deportation, which predictably often results in the embellishment of their own past hardships and other testimony. Separating the wheat from the chaff under these conditions is more of an art than a science, which is just one reason why an Immigration Judge may ultimately conclude that an alien is generally credible, but still not give full weight to his testimony. These fact-heavy determinations are complex and murky and present precisely the kind of questions that Congress has entrusted the agency alone to answer. And as Dai illustrated, we are supposed to consider the record as a whole, and diligently search for grounds to affirm the agency’s determination. We are bound to uphold agency decisions, even those of “less than ideal clarity if the agency’s path may be reasonably discerned.” Zamorano v. Garland, 2 F.4th 1213, 1222 (9th Cir. 2021) (quoting Dai, 141 S. Ct. at 1679). The overworked agency is not required to show every step of its work, or “follow a particular formula or incant ‘magic words’” in exercising its discretion. It is not required to disclose exactly what parts of the record it found persuasive or quantify how much of the petitioner’s testimony may have been discounted or even why. See id. Indeed, Dai makes clear that the agency may exercise its wide discretion in making these determinations implicitly, FLORES MOLINA V. GARLAND 41 and we must consider this possibility in searching through the record for support of the agency’s decision. See Dai, 141 S. Ct. at 1680–81. 3 3 Recognizing the difficulty in justifying the majority’s decision under substantial evidence review, Judge Korman’s separate concurrence proposes a solution both simple and elegant: just don’t defer. The concurrence acknowledges a divide within our circuit (and amongst the circuits) as to what standard of review should apply when determining whether certain facts constitute persecution, and expresses a preference for characterizing them as legal questions that we review de novo. Judge Korman argues for de novo review because “the BIA did not base its past persecution finding on a rejection of the veracity of Flores Molina’s description of his past experiences [i.e., an explicit adverse credibility determination]. Rather, the BIA held that Flores Molina’s ‘claimed past harm, cumulatively considered, does not rise to the level of past persecution.’” But Judge Korman seems to have missed the Supreme Court’s clear message in Dai. As explained above, Dai unmistakably directed that when reviewing agency decisions, even if no adverse credibility determination was explicitly made, we must account for the possibility that the agency did not give every factual assertion made by the petitioner full weight or persuasive value. Converting every question of what facts constitute persecution into a legal one that we review de novo does not allow for this possibility because it wrongly assumes the agency found a petitioner’s version of facts fully persuasive. Here, as in other cases where the agency did not explicitly reject the veracity of a petitioner’s testimony, we don’t know if the agency discounted Molina’s factual account of his past experiences. De novo review, as Judge Korman would prefer, cannot account for this possibility. Nor can Judge Korman avoid Dai by attempting to constrain its implications to only those cases that present a wholly “different set of facts than the one put forward by” the petitioner. The Supreme Court in Dai repeatedly chastised our court for failing to consider whether the agency had implicitly determined that some of the evidence in that case was “outweighed” by other facts in the record. Dai, 141 S. Ct. at 1681. Dai thus requires us to consider whether the agency may have implicitly given reduced weight to some of the facts in the record vis-à-vis others, and if so, defer to the agency’s conclusion. There is no way to do that under Judge Korman’s de novo approach—it is, in fact, just our old, 42 FLORES MOLINA V. GARLAND