Immigration – asylum — persecution

United States Court of Appeals

Civil

Immigration

Asylum; persecution

The potential for private violence based on personal grudges, and the inability of a country to protect its citizens from such unlawfulness, is not a basis for asylum.

“We have rejected a similar argument in Wang v. Gonzales, 445 F.3d 993 (7th Cir. 2006). Jun Ying Wang, a native of China, was present in the United States unlawfully having overstayed her visitor’s visa, when she was arrested for her part in a scheme to obtain Social Security cards using fraudulent documents. Id. at 994. Wang cooperated with the government’s investigation and in turn received a more lenient sentence. Id. She applied for asylum based on her fear that she would be attacked by her codefendants, who were in China and sought retribution for her cooperation against them. Id. We rejected the asylum claim, holding that Wang had failed to demonstrate that the persecution she feared was on account of one of the five statutorily-protected grounds. Wang did not explain how her claim fit within one of the protected grounds, choosing instead to argue that the term ‘refugee’ should not be interpreted too rigidly and that she should be eligible because her persecution stemmed from her assistance to the United States government. Id. at 997. The petitioners mirror those arguments in their briefs to this court. We rejected that argument in Wang, holding that we are bound by the language of the statute, and that fear of persecution as a result of a personal dispute rather than on account of a person’s membership in a protected group fails to satisfy the definition of refugee. Id. at 998; Marquez v. I.N.S., 105 F.3d 374, 380 (7th Cir. 1997).”

Petitions Denied.

10-1100 & 10-1101 Jonaitiene v. Holder

On Petition for Review of the Orders of the Board of Immigration Appeals, Rovner, J.