Immigration – asylum

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United States Court of Appeals For the Seventh Circuit

Civil

Immigration – asylum

The Board of Immigration Appeals may not engage in factfinding and treat those facts as binding precedent.

“Perhaps the Board’s view that it may make independent decisions about predictions is a consequence of giving itself too little leeway to find IJs’ predictions clearly erroneous. A federal court of appeals would be inclined to think it a clear error, correctible under Rule 52, for a district judge to say that a 1-in-100,000 chance of death meets a more-likely-than-not burden of persuasion. But that’s not what the Board did. Instead it claimed a right to substitute its judgment for that of the IJ without finding a clear error. That is a mistake under the regulation. A court is limited to the agency’s stated grounds of decision and cannot enforce an order on a basis that the agency did not include among its reasons. Our task, having corrected a legal error, is to remand to the Board rather than make our own decision. See, e.g., Gonzales v. Thomas, 547 U.S. 183 (2006).”

Petition Granted.

11-3086 Rosiles-Camarena v. Holder

Petition for Review of the Decision of the Board of Immigration Appeals, Easterbrook, J.