Court Opinion

ID: 9493569
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 15:11:56.454742+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:55:54.620436
License: Public Domain

O’SCANNLAIN, Circuit Judge,
dissenting:
Under the Immigration and Nationality Act, Gafoor and his family are eligible for asylum only if he has at least a “well-founded fear” that returning to Fiji would result in his “persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.” 8 U.S.C. § 1101(a)(42)(A). Because the motive of Gafoor’s potential tormentors is “critical” under the terms of the Act, “he must provide some evidence of it, direct or circumstantial,” in his asylum application. INS v. Elias-Zacarias, 502 U.S. 478, 112 S.Ct. 812, 817, 117 L.Ed.2d 38 (1992). Indeed, as the Supreme Court has taken pains to remind us, because Gafoor “seeks to obtain judicial reversal of the ... determination” of the Board of Immigration Appeals (“BIA”) that he has failed to show that he would risk persecution on account of one of the five grounds enumerated in the Act, he now “must show that the evidence he presented [to the BIA] was so compelling that no reasonable factfinder could fail to find” otherwise. Id. (emphasis added).
After a hasty acknowledgment of the formidable barriers to granting Gafoor relief, the majority grants it nevertheless. In doing so, the majority over-reads our decision in Borja v. INS, 175 F.3d 732 (9th Cir.1999) (en banc), to effect exactly the *658sort of judicial usurpation which the Supreme Court intended to forestall in Elias-Zacarias. As if this did not constitute sufficient arrogation of the Attorney General’s province, the majority also declares that this court can compel, sua sponte, a reopening of an asylee’s case whenever it concludes that conditions in his home country may have changed subsequent to the BIA’s adverse decision. This novel assertion conflicts with a plain holding of our court sitting en banc. I respectfully dissent.
I
Gafoor is a police officer who arrested a man he caught in the act of attempting to rape a thirteen-year-old-girl. The man turned out to be a high-ranking officer in the Fijian army who was, apparently as a result, promptly released. The next night, the same officer invaded Gafoor’s house with seven or eight uniformed men. The men beat Gafoor and took him to a military compound where they questioned him over the ensuing week about the arrest of the army officer and warned him not to testify against the officer or tell anyone else about the attempted rape. At some point in his incarceration, the army officer’s confederates also accused Gafoor of being “against the army.” Some time after Gafoor had recovered from his beating and incarceration, the army officer whom he had arrested led several men in another assault on Gafoor as he patrolled a public street. During the assault, one of the men told Gafoor that he “should go back to India.”
This course of events, which represents the sum of Gafoor’s factual testimony, establishes fairly plainly that the army officer orchestrated the attacks on Gafoor purely as reprisals for his arrest and vivid warnings of what would befall Gafoor if he ever disclosed the facts surrounding it. This is, appropriately enough, precisely what the immigration judge (“U”) and the BIA concluded. There is no dispute that this conclusion renders Gafoor ineligible for asylum under the Act, for reprisal and intimidation are not among the five cognizable grounds for persecution.
In granting Gafoor’s petition for review, however, the majority contends that these events establish that Gafoor’s assailants had motives other than reprisal and intimidation. In particular, the majority asserts that the vague accusation that Gafoor “op-posted] the army” and the slur to the effect that Gafoor “should go back to India” “compel[ ] a conclusion that he was persecuted not solely because he arrested a high-ranking army officer, but also because of his race and the political opinion imputed to him by the soldiers.” Supra at 651. Given that the evidence fails on the whole to do anything more than suggest that Gafoor’s imputed political opinion and race actually animated his assailants’ attacks, I think preposterous the majority’s implicit contention that “a reasonable fact-finder would have to conclude” that the evidence established as much. Elias-Zacarias, 502 U.S. at 481, 112 S.Ct. 812 (emphasis added).
A
The majority argues that the off-the-cuff accusation and slur emitted by Gafoor’s assailants amount to proof of enumerated motives by analogizing Gafoor’s case to those of the successful petitioners in Surita v. INS, 95 F.3d 814 (9th Cir.1996), and Prasad (Gaya) v. INS, 101 F.3d 614 (9th Cir.1996). See supra at 651. There are, however, important distinctions between those cases and Gafoor’s.
In Surita, the petitioner, an Indo-Fijian woman, was robbed twice daily by ethnic Fijians as she went to and from work. Her house was also looted by ethnic Fijian soldiers who “stated that they were looting the family’s home because the family was of Indian descent” and “told Surita that the family’s possessions belonged to ethnic Fijians.” Surita, 95 F.3d at 818, 819. On another occasion, the petitioner’s Hindu temple was desecrated and she and her *659mother were robbed attempting to worship at another place. Under these circumstances, we concluded that a reasonable factfinder would have had to conclude that the petitioner had “suffered past persecution on account of race.” Id. at 820.
Our holding in Surita cannot compel the conclusion that Gafoor was persecuted on account of race. Unlike the petitioner’s case in Surita, Gafoor’s assailants never declared that Gafoor was being assaulted because he was Indo-Fijian-they simply belittled him as an Indo-Fijian during their attack. The majority holds that this difference is “insufficient to distinguish the two cases,” because, with their derision, “[t]he soldiers made clear to Gafoor that his race and imputed political opinion contributed to their hatred of him and provided them with additional motive for their actions.” Supra at 651. According to the majority, the fact that the soldiers “did not tell him specifically that they were motivated by these factors is unimportant.” Surita differs from the present case, the majority contends, merely because the petitioner in Surita presented direct evidence of her persecutors’ motivations, whereas Gafoor presented circumstantial evidence. See supra at 651-52.
The majority is simply wrong. The two cases fundamentally differ with respect to the ultimate issue that the evidence in question proves. In Surita, the petitioner presented unrefuted evidence of an actual causal connection between her race and her persecution. But for her race, her attackers would have left her alone. Here, Gafoor has made no such showing. He has merely presented evidence that the soldiers taunted him with a racial slur during the course of an attack prompted by a personal vendetta. Taunting or degrading an opponent by referring to one or another of his traits hardly makes “clear” that the trait has any causal significance— indeed, the trait may be wholly irrelevant to any actual difference of opinion.1 The majority cannot be serious in holding that the utterance of such a racial slur not only suggests that a contemporaneous assault is racially motivated but compels that conclusion.
Nor does our decision in Prasad establish that a reasonable factfinder would have to conclude that Gafoor was persecuted on account of a political opinion imputed to him. The petitioner in Prasad was a local delegate of the Hindu-dominated Labor Party who was dogged by native Fijian military officers following the 1987 coup. See id. at 616. He was twice incarcerated and, “during his detention!,] ... was questioned about his involvement with the ousted Labour Party.” Id. The military also attempted to prevent the petitioner “from meeting in groups” with other Hindus. Id. We concluded that the petitioner had “established past persecution on account of his political activity.” Id. at 617.
Compared to the petitioner in Prasad, Gafoor has presented scant evidence that his political opinion (imputed or otherwise) actually motivated his tormentors. The majority implicitly relies on the fact that at least one of Gafoor’s jailers accused him of being “against the army.” See supra at 651 (“In his testimony before the IJ, Gaf-oor stated that when he was locked up at Nambala, the soldiers asked him why he had arrested an army officer and accused him of opposing the army.”). This fact is certainly suggestive, but taken alone — as it must be, for fin this regard it is alone — it can compel at most the uninteresting con-*660elusion that the accuser believed Gafoor to be opposed to the array. This is particularly so because the role of the unnamed accuser in the assaults on Gafoor is unknown and may well have been entirely peripheral.
Simply put, the facts that Gafoor’s assailants told him to go back to India and that an officer in the jail accused him of opposing the army do not compel the conclusion that Gafoor’s assailants were motivated by Gafoor’s race or political opinion. Nor would they be compelling even if we were to interpret these facts, as the majority insists, within the political “context” that the majority develops from sources wholly outside the administrative record, a “context” that Fisher v. INS, 79 F.3d 955, 964 (9th Cir.1996) (en banc), in fact prohibits us from considering. No decision of this court suggests otherwise. The majority thus oversteps its bounds in reversing the BIA’s decision.
B
Reality is that policeman Gafoor was persecuted because he caught a powerful military figure in flagrante delicto and dared to arrest the officer whom he witnessed in the criminal act of attempting to rape a young girl. No one thinks otherwise, not even the majority, which concedes that the soldiers were “activated” by the arrest. The fundamental problem, therefore, with the majority’s conclusion that Gafoor was indubitably persecuted “on account of’ his race and imputed political opinions is not really that the facts pointing thereto are less informative in this case than they were in Surita and Prasad. Indeed, at his hearing Gafoor himself unfailingly attributed his persecution, in the final calculus, to his arrest of the officer:
IJ: Did they tell you why they were beating you up?
Gafoor: They thought, they thought that I had sent some kind of enemy with them.
IJ: Some kind of what?
Gafoor: Enemy. Uh, they said that they were going to kill me and, and they were going to kill my family.
IJ: Why?
Gafoor: Because I arrested them.
IJ: Why? Wait a minute. Why did you think they took you to the military camp? Why do you think you were arrested?
Gafoor: They said that we have some kind of enmity with each other but I — They said that we police officers, we don’t like the army but it was — they said they were going to kill me and destroy us and he beat me.
IJ: Did he tell you why they thought you, there was some kind of enmity between the Army and the police?
Gafoor: He said why I was arresting the Army officer. I didn’t know.
Hiester:2 As far as you know, he was never charged with the crime?
Gafoor: If they would have charged him with the crime, then nothing would have — then they wouldn’t have done to me what, what they did to me.
Hiester: If he was not charged with the crime, why was the military so interested in you?
Gafoor: They were angry with me.
Hiester: About what?
Gafoor: Because I arrested an Army officer.
The majority implies that the undisputed fact that Gafoor’s arrest of the army officer caused his persecution is irrelevant *661because we held in Borja “that asylum may be granted if the persecution ‘was motivated, at least in part, by an actual or implied protected ground.’ ” Supra at 652 (quoting Borja, 175 F.3d at 736). The majority is mistaken. The fact that an act of abuse may be “motivated” by two or more distinct considerations does not dispense with the logical requirement that any single factor actually “motivated” the conduct.
This requirement, I would be the first to acknowledge, is not easily satisfied. Concluding that something actually “motivated” a human being to act is often not only speculative but conceptually challenging. Is a situational factor that makes a person’s action more likely to occur than it otherwise would be a “motive”? What if only infinitesimally more likely? Is a factor a “motive” when it is sufficient to incite an action but does not make that action more likely to occur at all (because the action will certainly occur anyway)?
Answering these questions and marshaling evidence to categorize situational factors as precisely as the resulting answers may demand requires a degree of inferential hair-splitting that the majority in Bor-ja did not, and indeed did not need to, address. The majority concluded that there could be little doubt that the petitioner’s announced opposition to the New People’s Army (“NPA”) was the sufficient and primary cause that “triggered” the NPA agents’ extortion and ensuing attack on her. See Borja, 175 F.3d at 736, 737 (“Had she not interjected her willingness to pay, the evidence strongly suggests that the NPA would have taken her life as a response to her political statement.”).
Unlike the facts of Borja, the facts of this case plainly indicate that the petitioner would not have been persecuted absent a motive that is not enumerated in the Act — that is, Gafoor would never have been persecuted if he had not arrested the army officer. This case thus requires us to determine just how causally significant a factor must be for us to conclude that it is a “motive” for purposes of the Act. It is apparent that for the majority, a motivating factor need not have any causal significance at all. The majority claims that persecution may be “on account of’ a protected ground even if the protected ground is neither a sufficient nor even a necessary cause of the persecution. See supra at 653 (“It is unreasonable, therefore, to require asylum applicants to show that a protected ground, standing alone, would have led to their persecution, or even to require a showing that the persecution would not have occurred in the absence of a protected ground.”). The majority’s definition of “motive” remains elusive, but it is apparent that it does not comprehend the concept of causation.
In dispensing with a causation requirement, the majority wilfully disregards the well-settled law of this court. We have regularly rejected the proposition that pro-secutory conduct is “on account of’ a statutorily protected characteristic just because the presence of that characteristic enhanced the probability that the persecutor conduct would occur. See, e.g., Singh v. INS, 134 F.3d 962, 970 (9th Cir.1998) (acknowledging that ethnic Fijians were known to commit crimes against Indo-Fijians because of their race but rejecting the petitioner’s allegation that crimes committed against her by persons who may have been ethnic Fijians were “on account of’ her race); Sangha v. INS, 103 F.3d 1482, 1490 (9th Cir.1997) (noting that, even if guerrillas had imputed opposing political opinion to petitioner, there was “no evidence” that the guerrillas’ persecution of him was “‘on account of [his] political views”).
The majority seemingly feels that it would be unfair to require asylum applicants actually to demonstrate that they were persecuted “on account of’ a protected ground. Causation, after all, is a tricky business and can raise difficult evidentiary obstacles. Congress has lowered the burden for Title VII plaintiffs; why shouldn’t toe, the majority asks, lower the burden for *662asylum applicants? In the face of the extravagance and impertinence of this argument, is it too pedestrian to explain that Congress has already weighed the relevant policy choices and decided to require asy-lees to demonstrate that they suffered persecution “on account of’ a protected ground? Of course, it is for Congress alone to decide whether to lower the burden as it has done for Title VII plaintiffs, in contrast to asylum applicants.
The evidence in this case and the history of Fiji developed outside the record do nothing to suggest — much less conclusively establish — that Gafoor’s race had anything to do with the violence he suffered. The majority does not, and indeed cannot, contend that he would have been treated any differently were he an ethnic Fijian. He has plainly failed to show that his persecution was “on account of’ his race or imputed political opinion, as that term has been interpreted time-and again by this court.
II
In addition to reversing the BIA’s determination that Gafoor has not demonstrated past persecution on account of a statutorily enumerated ground, the majority proceeds to reject the BIA’s determination that a change in country conditions refutes any supposition that Gafoor has a well-founded fear of persecution in the future. The majority observes that country conditions have changed yet again since the BIA made its determination, see supra at 654 (“Since that time, all progress made in Fiji toward eliminating racial conflict has been undone.”), and remands for the BIA to consider changes in country conditions as of, one is left to imagine, right now. The majority bases its disregard for the BIA’s determination not on anything in the record (because there is no support there) but on post-hearing magazine articles. The majority acknowledges but essentially disregards the fact that we have held explicitly that “we are limited to reviewing the facts considered by the Board” and “are statutorily prevented from taking judicial notice” of evidence from outside the administrative record in reviewing asylum claims. Fisher v. INS, 79 F.3d 955, 963 (9th Cir.1996) (en banc) (emphasis added).
The majority attempts to skirt our plainly controlling decision in Fisher by relying on a particularly broad dictum from Lising v. INS, 124 F.3d 996 (9th Cir.1997). See supra at 655 (“In particular, Fisher related to evidentiary material that could have been, but was not, presented to the BIA.”) (citing Lising, 124 F.3d at 998). Lising, given a fair reading, stands only for the proposition that we may take judicial notice of extra-record INS forms that rest in official INS files. See 124 F.3d at 998 (“Fisher does not treat the issue of a court’s taking judicial notice of the agency’s own records — and particularly of an official INS form that serves as the very basis of the BIA’s decision.”); cf. id. at 999 (Boochever, J., concurring) (“While I agree that almost all rules may be subject to exceptions for unforeseen contingencies, I do not believe that it is necessary in this case to carve even the narrow exception to Fisher v. INS proposed by the majority.” (citation omitted) (emphasis added)). Whatever the merit of Lising,3 it hardly supports the majority’s claim that any perceived change in country conditions nullifies the BIA’s otherwise valid determination.
In taking judicial notice of recent developments in Fiji as reported in several magazine articles, matters entirely outside the record, the majority has plainly exceeded the bounds of this court’s authority as a reviewing court under the law of this circuit. See Fisher, 79 F.3d at 963; see also Gomez-Vigil v. INS, 990 F.2d 1111, 1113 (9th Cir.1993) (because “ ‘this court does not sit as an administrative agency for the purpose of fact-finding in the first instance’,” it “must reject petitioners’ im*663plied request that we consider news articles and other materials appended to the briefs that were not part of the administrative record.”) (quoting Tejeda-Mata v. INS, 626 F.2d 721, 726 (9th Cir.1980)). But the majority does not stop there. The majority relies upon articles that appeared six months after this case was argued and submitted, let alone almost two years after the BIA’s decision was filed. Federal Rule of Evidence 201(e), which governs judicial notice, provides that a party must be afforded “an opportunity to be heard as to the propriety of taking judicial notice and the tenor of the matter noticed.” See also Gomez-Vigil, 990 F.2d at 1115 (Aldisert, J., concurring) (“A court may take judicial notice of facts without prior notification to the parties, so long as the court subsequently provides an opportunity to rebut the noticed facts....”) The majority deprives the INS of any opportunity to respond, before this court, to its unwelcome excursus on recent developments in Fijian politics.
Even if one were to acknowledge the lawfulness of the majority’s proposed “recent events” new exception to the rule in Fisher and the lawfulness of the majority’s manner of taking judicial notice, one would nevertheless expect such “recent events” to be at least facially relevant to the issue the BIA was deciding — otherwise, there would be a new reason to remand with every new day (or at least with every new issue of The Economist). And yet, we are left disappointed. Here, the majority makes almost no effort to evaluate the relevance of the “recent events” to the issue of whether Gafoor is more likely than he was in 1992 to face renewed persecution at the hands of the army officer and his personal posse, who were the only Fijians who ever molested Gafoor, even at the height of the 1987 coup. The “recent events,” as it turns out, are not terribly germane.
I regret that I cannot endorse the majority’s proposed “recent events” exception to Fisher. It is plainly contrary to that decision, and it invites, precisely the sort of misapplication that the majority has engaged in here. The net effect will inevitably be to frustrate and to obstruct the enforcement of our immigration laws as judges of this court persist in attempting to grant relief that Congress has delegated exclusively to the Attorney General to grant.
Ill
The BIA’s dismissal of Gafoor’s appeal was supported by substantial evidence and perfectly justified. Gafoor has endured dreadful misfortune, but he has not been persecuted on account of any statutorily enumerated ground. Even if he had been, nothing in the record undermines the BIA’s conclusion that conditions in Fiji are now such that Gafoor need no longer fear persecution at the untrammeled hands of a vengeful army officer or any'of his soul-mates.
I respectfully dissent.

. This principle is so self-evident and intuitive that Hollywood routinely applies it for mass amusement: Sarcastic derision is frequently deployed in the dialogue of action movies to insinuate comic relief into even the most violent of confrontations between mortal enemies. For example, in the opening scene of Tomorrow Never Dies, super-agent James Bond is infiltrating a terrorist arms bazaar. He incapacitates a cigarette-smoking henchman while superciliously muttering the line: "Filthy habit." Tomorrow Never Dies (United Artists 1997). Despite the pointed reference, only the hopelessly obtuse would maintain that Bond dispatched the gun-toting smoker "on account of” his tobacco use.

. Thomas L. Hiester was the attorney of record for Gafoor.

. This is slight, given that the analysis rested on the hoary jurisprudential proposition that a precedent of this court is only as applicable as a later panel cares to allow.