In the case of Urias-Orellana v. Bondi, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled in favor of the federal government. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote 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.
Douglas Humberto Urias-Orellana, his wife Sayra Iliana Gamez-Mejia, and their child fled El Salvador in 2021 because they were afraid of violence. They applied for asylum in the United States.
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. He said that people who worked for this sicario had asked him for money many times and had even attacked him once, according to the SCOTUS Blog.
The Immigration and Nationality Act says that immigration judges look at whether applicants came to the U.S. because of “persecution or a well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.”
For Urias-Orellana, 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 look into it.
The board, on the other hand, upheld the judge’s decision on persecution and the order of removal in 2023. “If the BIA denies an asylum claim, asylum seekers can ask a federal court of appeals to review it. The family did what they were asked to do, which 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 lenient substantial-evidence standard. Jackson said in the court’s ruling that the BIA’s decision can only be reversed “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 many 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 country’s highest court has already said that this subsection “prescribe[s] a deferential, ‘substantial-evidence standard’ for review of agency factual findings.”
According to Jackson, the Supreme Court’s decision on Wednesday also strengthened its 1992 decision in INS v. Elias-Zacarias, in which most of the 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 “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 courts must uphold those findings unless the evidence clearly shows that they are wrong.
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.
