Opinion ID: 2960320
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Mendis’s Removal Proceedings

Text: In July 2002, Mendis, a native and citizen of Sri Lanka, entered the United States on a tourist visa. Mendis remained in the United States beyond the expiration of his visa, and on July 2 31, 2004, the Department of Homeland Security charged him as removable from the United States under 8 U.S.C. § 1227(a)(1)(B). Mendis appeared before an IJ in September 2004, where he conceded removability as charged. Mendis sought relief from removal by applying for (1) asylum; (2) withholding of removal under 8 U.S.C. § 1231(b)(3); and (3) withholding of removal under the Convention Against Torture (“CAT”). In the alternative, Mendis sought voluntary departure. In support of his application, Mendis alleged that he had been arrested, detained, and beaten by the Sri Lankan military because the army believed that he had supplied banned items to the rebel Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. He also claimed that an army officer advised him to go into hiding. At two separate master calendar hearings in September and November 2004, Mendis declined to designate a removal country under § 1231(b)(2)(A). The IJ designated Sri Lanka, Mendis’s country of citizenship, as a country of removal at both hearings. At an individual merits hearings in April 2006, Mendis testified in support of his application for relief from removal, detailing the persecution he had faced in Sri Lanka. During this hearing, Mendis testified that he traveled from Sri Lanka to the United States, passing through Qatar and London en route. Mendis was not asked for any additional details regarding his time in London, and there is no indication from the record that Mendis ever went through British immigration and customs or left the airport. At the end of the April 2006 hearing, the IJ (1) pretermitted Mendis’s asylum application by finding that Mendis had submitted his application after the one-year statutory deadline and that he had failed to present changed or extraordinary circumstances to justify the delay in filing; (2) granted Mendis’s application for withholding of removal to Sri Lanka, finding that there was a clear probability that he would be subject to persecution should he be compelled to return; (3) 3 denied Mendis’s application for CAT relief, finding that the mistreatment he faced in Sri Lanka did not rise to the level of torture; (4) denied Mendis’s request for voluntary departure; and (5) ordered Mendis removed to the United Kingdom, “as that is the country of the respondent’s last transit to the United States.”