Court Opinion

ID: 9490558
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 13:47:07.142763+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:54:10.355986
License: Public Domain

KLEINFELD, Circuit Judge,
dissenting:
I respectfully dissent.
The BIA correctly identified the legal question, whether “the criminal nature of the respondent’s acts outweigh their political nature.” The crime need not, to exclude asylum, be “atrocious” (and Aguirre-Aguirre’s was not) if it “is disproportionate to the objective.” McMullen v. INS, 788 F.2d 591, 595 (9th Cir.1986). Because the BIA opinion analyzes the question as the majority opinion says it should, the majority cannot (and does not) point to legal error. The issue is entirely one of weighing Aguirre-Aguirre’s crimes against his political objectives.
*525Aguirre-Aguirre testified in support of his asylum claim that his political purpose was to protest the high bus fares, and also to protest government failure to investigate disappearances and murders. The actions he took were neither peaceful nor directed at the government. They were violent, and directed at uninvolved people. Here is Aguirre-Aguirre’s own description, worth reading in full, on cross examination by government counsel, of the criminal activities of which he was a leader:
... we burned buses ---- splashing with gasoline and then burned them and then burned the tires and all.
Q. And were there any people on board these buses when you did this?
A. No, because we would stop the bus, help all the people get out of the bus, and then because there were so many, we would just stone them and make them get away and then burn the bus.
Q. To your knowledge, was anyone hurt during any of these bus burnings or stonings?
A. No, we just hit them if they did not want to get off the bus.
Q. How did you hit them? Did you strike them with a club, or how?
A. We would have sticks, you know, to hit them with, or we would just tie them with ropes. But, if they be, I mean, if they hit our, uh, bus then we get off the bus.
Q. And, these people who were on the bus were just ordinary citizens of Guatemala?
A. Yes.
Q. When you were burning these buses and throwing rocks and things at people, did you cover your face with a bandanna or in some other way hide your identity?
A. Yes, we would cover our faces.
Q. And during the times that you burned the buses, you say you also broke windows and other things?
A. Yeah, we would break the windows of the stores and we would just take, I mean, uh, raid the stores. Taking everything they have.
Q. So, you were, in other words, looting the stores?
A. No, we did not steal from the stores. We simply took the people out of the stores that were there. And we would throw everything on the floor.
Q. The people who were in the stores, did you treat them in a similar fashion that you treated the people on the bus, that is, throw rocks at them and hit them with sticks and tie them with ropes in order to get them to go?
A. If they did not try to do anything to us, we would not do anything to them. Because, we would always explain to the people who were there in the buses, for instance, why we were doing this and why we were protesting and doing these things, because of the high fares that the buses had. Some of them would even support us.
Could the BIA reasonably conclude that Aguirre-Aguirre’s crimes were disproportionate to his political objectives? Yes indeed.
My colleagues read the evidence as “crimes against property” combined with “minor assaults and batteries.” Beating people with sticks and stoning them, does not seem “minor” to me. Hitting someone on the head with a stick in the nature of a baseball bat or a stone in the nature of a brick is reasonably likely to cause brain damage. It is hard to imagine a band of masked young men, angry enough to burn buses, being especially gentle and kind as they stone people, hit them with “sticks,” and tie them up. There is no reason to suppose that the sticks were like the flexible yardsticks one gets for free at the hardware store, as opposed to baseball bats. The bus passengers, perhaps travelling to work or going home exhausted at the end of hard days, probably would not interrupt their journeys for a bunch of angry boys with little sticks. The shopkeepers, not their inanimate inventory, were the victims of having their stores trashed. Nor is it evident to me why burning buses and trashing stores is proportional to a protest largely directed at bus fares. *526(When he testified, Aguirre-Aguirre sometimes forgot to mention that his group was also upset about disappearances.)
Asylum law is supposed to protect innocent victims of persecution. We grossly distort it by requiring the government to give asylum to violent criminals. The United States should be a haven for innocent people fleeing persecution. It should not be a haven for thugs.