Court Opinion

ID: 9580661
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-21 22:07:18.67897+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T13:36:25.797386
License: Public Domain

DENNIS JACOBS, Chief Judge,
concurring:
I concur with Judge Katzmann’s opinion because it is an appropriate application of Tambadou v. Gonzales, 446 F.3d 298 (2d Cir.2006). See United States v. Brutus, 505 F.3d 80, 87 n. 5 (2d Cir.2007) (“[W]e are bound by the decisions of prior panels until such time as they are overruled either by an en banc panel of our Court or by the Supreme Court.”) (internal quotation marks and citation omitted). I write separately to emphasize that Tambadou speaks to circumstances rarely presented to this Court, and to warn against over-reading our rather limited holding in that case.
Tambadou contains wording that is sound in its context, and should not be misconstrued. That case concerned an asylum applicant who had been expelled from his native Mauritania to Senegal because of his ethnicity. The BIA denied asylum, concluding that country conditions in Mauritania had changed such that Tam-badou no longer had a well founded fear of persecution there. “The BIA based its conclusion solely on information selectively extracted from the Department of State’s 1996 Country Report on conditions in Mauritania.” Tambadou, 446 F.3d at 302. The report — which was six years out of date when the BIA considered Tambadou’s case — “reported that the Mauritanian government was cooperating with humanitarian groups ‘to assist returnees from the refugee camps in Senegal’ who were expelled between 1989 and 1991.” Id. at 300. Thus, “[t]he BIA generally stated that refugees were reportedly being repatriated over a number of years, and concluded that this analysis was sufficient to deny asylum.” Id. at 303.
The BIA, failing to notice Tambadou’s testimony that many of those who were repatriated had subsequently been killed, erroneously ruled that “because Petitioner did not offer contradictory evidence, the State Department profile was entitled to deference.” Id.
We vacated the BIA’s finding of changed country conditions noting that (1) “not only was there contradictory testimony that the BIA ignored, but it failed to use the information in the Report in a case-specific manner and supplement it with further analysis,” id.; and (2) “the BIA deferred to the Report in a casual, conclusory fashion, ignored the contradictory information that Tambadou presented, and then failed to make the required individualized analysis. The BIA also ignored significant information favorable to Tambadou in the Report,” id. at 304.
The reference to the need for “individualized analysis” is context specific. When yanked out of its context, it is easily subject to at least three misreadings.
First, to the extent that an asylum applicant’s personal history and characteristics do not constitute protected grounds, Tam-badou does not require the agency to consider those facts in determining whether country conditions have changed. Such a requirement would gut the usefulness of country reports as an indicator that country conditions have changed, and would transcend the purposes of the asylum laws.
Second, Tambadou does not prevent the agency from resting its finding of changed country conditions solely on country reports even if other record evidence conflicts with it.
*105Third, Tambadou does not require that the agency perform and enunciate any kind of specific, on-record “analysis” justifying its findings that country conditions have changed. “[Ajdministrative findings of fact are conclusive unless any reasonable adjudicator would be compelled to conclude to the contrary.” 8 U.S.C. § 1252(b)(4)(B). The agency’s findings with respect to changed country conditions are therefore upheld when record evidence supports those determinations. To survive our review for substantial evidence, the agency need not engage in special on-record recitation of facts, or perform any ceremony or incantation.