Opinion ID: 4511499
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: The Agency’s Legal Errors

Text: We conclude the IJ and BIA misapplied our precedent in two respects: First, although they purported to consider the incidents “cumulatively,” A.R. 3, 53, in practice they evaluated the threats to Petitioner in isolation and without accounting for the broader campaign of intimidation, harassment, and violence substantiated by the record; second, they treated the absence of physical harm to Petitioner herself as fatal to her claim without acknowledging the significance of violence to Petitioner’s property and close associates. 1 1 While we sometimes accord Chevron deference to the BIA’s interpretation of statutory terms, see, e.g., S.E.R.L. v. Att’y Gen., 894 F.3d 535, 542 (3d Cir. 2018), we do not where, as here, the BIA’s opinion is “unpublished, non-precedential[, and] issued by a single BIA member,” Mahn v. Att’y Gen., 767 F.3d 170, 173 (3d. Cir. 2014); and the government concedes as much. In this case, moreover, the BIA based its threat analysis 12
Effect of Petitioner’s Mistreatment. Both the IJ and BIA failed to give the proper weight to the cumulative effect of Petitioner’s experiences. The IJ’s analysis began by considering the incidents one at a time and concluding that none of the incidents, standing alone, rose to the level of past persecution. First, the IJ, without elaboration, concluded that the Sandinistas’ burning of Petitioner’s family’s home, although “a terrible loss,” did not “rise[] to a level of persecution.” A.R. 53. The IJ then considered the incident in which the Sandinistas shot Petitioner’s convoy and killed her compatriot and determined that, because this incident was a “physical attack that d[id] not result in serious injury” to Petitioner, it was not past persecution. Id. With respect to the verbal threats Petitioner received—including the final incident in which Sandinistas threatened to kill her at the grocery store—the IJ purported to consider the record “cumulatively,” but concluded that because “[s]he was never physically harmed” and the threats “were not so menacing as to cause actual physical suffering or harm,” these too did not amount to past persecution. Id. 2 exclusively on our precedent—a body of authority we create and are well qualified to interpret. 2 The IJ also relied on the fact that Petitioner was “[n]ever threatened by a government official or anyone other than Sandinista citizens who were in disagreement with her over her political beliefs.” A.R. 54. But persecution includes mistreatment by both the government and “forces the government is either unable or unwilling to control.” Sheriff, 587 F.3d at 589 (internal quotation marks and citation omitted). 13 That was not a faithful application of our cumulative approach to past persecution. Even if the IJ was correct that no single incident in isolation rose to the level of past persecution, he was still required to analyze whether the cumulative effect of these incidents constituted a severe “threat to life or freedom.” Fei Mei Cheng, 623 F.3d at 192–93 (citation omitted). A cursory invocation of the word “cumulative” is insufficient. By finding it dispositive that Petitioner herself “was never physically harmed” and “never arrested or imprisoned,” A.R. 53–54, and by failing to factor in the cumulative effect of the destruction of Petitioner’s home, the shooting of her convoy, the murder of her political compatriot, the armed robbery of the inauguration preparations, and the verbal death threat, the IJ erred. The BIA similarly erred. It endorsed the IJ’s approach, finding no erroneous conclusions of law or findings of fact and agreeing that Petitioner did not experience past persecution. Like the IJ, the BIA professed to have considered Petitioner’s experiences “cumulatively,” A.R. 3, but did not acknowledge or even discuss how the various instances of mistreatment together might substantiate the threats and constitute past persecution. Instead, it summarily concluded that “these events were [not] so extreme as to rise to the level of past Here, the record is replete with undisputed facts showing the Nicaraguan government cannot or will not control the Sandinistas. E.g., A.R. 55–56. So on de novo review, for the reasons explained below, we conclude that Petitioner was mistreated by forces the Nicaraguan government cannot control. Indeed, the Government here concedes as much by failing to dispute that Petitioner’s persecutors met this requirement. 14 persecution.” Id. The BIA, like the IJ, thus paid lip service to our cumulative approach, but determining past persecution requires more than considering whether individual incidents are sufficiently “extreme”; it requires meaningful consideration of whether their aggregate effect poses a “severe affront[] to the [petitioner’s] life or freedom,” Gomez-Zuluaga, 527 F.3d at 341. Petitioner’s experiences did not receive that consideration here. 2. Persecution Can Be Established Without Physical Harm to Petitioner. The agency’s second error flows from its first: In failing to look to the surrounding context of the threat, the IJ and BIA placed undue emphasis on whether Petitioner herself experienced physical harm and found its absence fatal to her claim. See A.R. 4 (BIA opinion) (finding that the death threat Petitioner received was insufficiently menacing because Petitioner did not experience the same physical violence as the petitioner in Gomez-Zuluaga); A.R. 53 (IJ opinion) (finding no past persecution because, although Petitioner “faced some threats,” she “was never physically harmed”). That was contrary to our case law. We have never reduced our persecution analysis to a checklist or suggested that physical violence—or any other single type of mistreatment—is a required element of the past persecution determination. Instead, we have approached asylum claims on a case-by-case basis and engaged in a factspecific analysis to determine whether a petitioner’s cumulative experience amounts to a “severe affront[] to [that petitioner’s] life or freedom,” Gomez-Zuluaga, 527 F.3d at 341. Neither our “concrete and menacing” standard for when verbal threats constitute past persecution nor our other 15 persecution law suggests physical violence to the petitioner is a prerequisite to a finding of past persecution. To the contrary, both make clear it is not. 3 In evaluating whether a threat is “concrete and menacing” in the absence of physical harm to a petitioner, we have considered more broadly whether surrounding acts of mistreatment had corroborated that threat with the ultimate effect of placing the petitioner’s life or liberty in peril. See, e.g., Gomez-Zuluaga, 527 F.3d at 342–43. We have not required there to be physical harm when the petitioner is threatened with imminent violence, see, e.g., Chavarria, 446 F.3d at 519–20 (finding a threat concrete and menacing where the petitioner was forced into a car and threatened at gunpoint but not physically injured), or that there be a threat that physical harm will be inflicted in the immediate future, see, e.g., id. (finding armed men’s threat that they would kill petitioner if they “ever ca[ught] [him] again” concrete and menacing). And we have not insisted that all surrounding mistreatment be in close temporal proximity to the verbal threat. See, e.g., Voci v. Gonzales, 409 F.3d 607, 614 (3d Cir. 3 Our sister circuits have likewise recognized that verbal threats substantiated by other kinds of mistreatment may be sufficient. See, e.g., De Santamaria v. U.S. Att’y Gen., 525 F.3d 999, 1009 (11th Cir. 2008) (“[W]e have not required serious physical injury where the petitioner demonstrates repeated threats combined with other forms of severe mistreatment.”); Tamara-Gomez v. Gonzales, 447 F.3d 343, 348, 349 n.8 (5th Cir. 2006) (holding that the petitioner was persecuted when threats were “considered in context” and noting that “physical harm is not always a requirement for asylum”). 16 2005) (finding that verbal threats to the petitioner and his family unaccompanied by physical violence contributed to a pattern of persecution when those threats were made credible by separate incidents of physical violence to the petitioner). Nor have we limited that mistreatment to physical as opposed to, for instance, economic harm. See, e.g., Fei Mei Cheng, 623 F.3d at 193–95 (finding past persecution where the petitioner experienced a pattern of “escalating and consummated threats” involving both verbal threats and the seizure of her family farm). And while past mistreatment of a petitioner or her property may be sufficiently corroborative and substantiating, depending on the facts of the case, e.g., Gomez-Zuluaga, 527 F.3d at 342–43 (previous threats of violence), so too may be mistreatment of a petitioner’s family members, e.g., Camara v. Att’y Gen., 580 F.3d 196, 204–05 (3d Cir. 2009) (threats corroborated by the “forcible seizure and removal” of the petitioner’s father); Fei Mei Cheng, 623 F.3d at 193–95 (threats corroborated by economic sanctions of the petitioner’s family). As relevant to this case and as logically flows from this precedent, physical harm to a petitioner’s close associates may also, in combination with verbal threats, establish past persecution. This harm—no less than destruction of personal property and physical or economic harm to a petitioner’s family—can contribute to an overall experience of past persecution by rendering verbal threats “concrete and menacing,” establishing a “severe affront[] to the [petitioner’s] life or freedom,” Gomez-Zuluaga, 527 F.3d at 341–42; see Tamara-Gomez v. Gonzales, 447 F.3d 343, 346, 348–49 (5th Cir. 2006) (finding that a petitioner suffered past persecution when verbal threats were corroborated by the murders of his compatriots); see also Caushi v. Att’y Gen., 436 F.3d 220, 227 17 (3d Cir. 2006) (finding that “the violence, intimidation, and assassinations” directed at the petitioner’s political party contributed to his experience of past persecution); Li Wu Lin v. INS, 238 F.3d 239, 244 (3d Cir. 2001) (finding that the government’s attempt to arrest the petitioner was more likely to be political persecution because his fellow student activists “were beaten, incarcerated, and subjected to forced labor ‘for their student movement activities’”). 4 In sum, the IJ and BIA erred in failing to meaningfully consider the combined effect of the incidents in the record and in conditioning a finding of past persecution based on verbal threats on a showing of physical violence to Petitioner. When a petitioner has suffered a pattern of conduct that includes threats that are “concrete and menacing” because they are substantiated by physical or economic harm to herself, her family, her property, or those in a close relationship to her, the cumulative effect of that conduct “constitute[s] a real threat to life or freedom,” Chang, 119 F.3d at 1066, and she has suffered past persecution. 4 Our decision in Zhen Hua Li is not to the contrary. In that case, we found that petitioner had received unfulfilled threats that did not rise to the level of past persecution despite the petitioner’s testimony that someone in his community who engaged in the same activity as the petitioner had been arrested and beaten for this conduct. Zhen Hua Li, 400 F.3d at 164. But the petitioner in that case did not actually witness the mistreatment; he only had anecdotal knowledge of it. Id. And the alleged harm did not befall anyone with whom the petitioner was closely associated, but merely someone in his community. Id. 18