In the case of Urias Orellana v
In the case of Urias-Orellana v. Bondi, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in favor of the federal government on Wednesday. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote the opinion, which said that federal courts of appeals must use a deferential standard of review when deciding whether asylum seekers have faced the level of persecution needed to qualify for asylum protections.
The case started when Douglas Humberto Urias-Orellana, his wife Sayra Iliana Gamez-Mejia, and their child applied for asylum. They fled to the United States in 2021 because they were threatened with violence in El Salvador.
Urias-Orellana said that the family should get asylum because a hitman, or sicario, was after them in El Salvador and had already killed two of his half-brothers. According to the SCOTUS Blog, he said that people who worked with this sicario had asked him for money many times and even hit him once.
The Immigration and Nationality Act says that immigration judges look at whether applicants came to the U.S. because they were being persecuted or had a good reason to fear persecution because of their race, religion, nationality, membership in a certain social group, or political opinion.
In Urias-Orellana’s case, a judge said that his experiences did not meet this standard, in part because the family had moved within El Salvador to avoid danger in the past. After this decision, the family’s lawyers asked the Board of Immigration Appeals to hear their case.
In 2023, however, the board upheld the judge’s decision on persecution and the order of
In 2023, however, the board upheld the judge’s decision on persecution and the order of removal. “Under the INA, asylum seekers can ask a federal court of appeals to review their asylum claim if the BIA denies it. The family did what they asked, and that led to the Supreme Court case. SCOTUS Blog said, “The justices agreed to settle a disagreement between the federal courts of appeals over what standard of review the courts should use when reviewing a persecution determination.”
The court said on Wednesday that the INA says that appellate courts must use the relatively deferential substantial-evidence standard. That means, as Jackson said in the court’s decision, the BIA’s decision can only be overturned “if, in reviewing the record as a whole, any reasonable adjudicator would be compelled to conclude to the contrary.”
Jackson said that the part of the INA that matters “does not use the phrase ‘substantial evidence.’” She went on to say, though, that several other parts of the law “truncate[] the court’s review,” including Section 1252(b)(4)(B), which says that “the administrative findings of fact are conclusive unless any reasonable adjudicator would be compelled to conclude to the contrary.”
Jackson wrote that the highest court in the country has said before that this subsection “prescribes a deferential, ‘substantial-evidence standard’ for review of agency factual findings.”
Jackson says that the Supreme Court’s decision on Wednesday also strengthened its 1992 decision in INS v. Elias-Zacarias, in which most justices said that “to obtain judicial reversal” of the agency’s persecution determination, an asylum applicant “must show that the evidence he presented was so compelling that no reasonable factfinder could fail to find the requisite fear of persecution.”
Jackson said in her ruling that even though “Congress amended the INA shortly after” that
Jackson said in her ruling that even though “Congress amended the INA shortly after” that decision, adding what is now Section 1252(b)(4)(B), “those amendments … codified the Elias-Zacarias standard,” not rejected it.
She said that the law says that courts must uphold those findings unless the evidence clearly shows that a different conclusion is needed.
Jackson wrote, “The agency’s decision is generally ‘conclusive unless any reasonable adjudicator would be compelled to conclude to the contrary.’”
Jackson said that “the force of Elias-Zacarias and [the statutes’] enactment history” meant that the substantial-evidence standard had to apply, according to SCOTUS Blog.
