The Supreme Court unanimously ruled in favor of the federal government on Wednesday in the case of Urias-Orellana v. Bondi in an opinion written by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson that said federal courts of appeals must apply a deferential standard of review when evaluating the Board of Immigration Appeals’ decision regarding whether asylum seekers have faced the level of persecution required to qualify for asylum protections.
The case originated from an asylum application submitted by Douglas Humberto Urias-Orellana, his wife, Sayra Iliana Gamez-Mejia, and their child, who fled to the United States in 2021 due to threats of violence in El Salvador.
Urias-Orellana argued that the family qualified for asylum because they were being pursued in El Salvador by a hitman, known as a sicario, who had previously shot two of his half-brothers. He stated that associates of this sicario had repeatedly demanded money from him and had physically assaulted him on one occasion, the SCOTUS Blog reported.
When deciding whether to grant an asylum request, immigration judges evaluate if applicants came to the U.S. due to “persecution or a well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion,” as specified in the Immigration and Nationality Act.
In the case of Urias-Orellana, a judge found that his experiences did not meet this standard, in part because the family had previously avoided danger by relocating within El Salvador. Following this ruling, the family’s legal team appealed to the Board of Immigration Appeals.
However, in 2023, 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 so, and that request led to the Supreme Court case. The justices agreed to resolve a disagreement between the federal courts of appeals over what standard of review the courts should use when reviewing a persecution determination,” noted SCOTUS Blog.
On Wednesday, the court ruled that the INA requires appellate courts to use the relatively deferential substantial-evidence standard. That means, as Jackson explained in the court’s ruling, reversal of the BIA’s decision is “warranted only if, in reviewing the record as a whole, any reasonable adjudicator would be compelled to conclude to the contrary.’”
Jackson noted that the relevant part of the INA “does not use the phrase ‘substantial evidence.’” However, she continued, multiple other phrases in the statute “truncate[] the court’s review,” including Section 1252(b)(4)(B), which states that “the administrative findings of fact are conclusive unless any reasonable adjudicator would be compelled to conclude to the contrary.”
The nation’s highest court has held before that this subsection “prescribe[s] a deferential, ‘substantial-evidence standard’ for review of agency factual findings,” Jackson wrote.
Per Jackson, with Wednesday’s ruling, the Supreme Court also strengthened its 1992 holding in INS v. Elias-Zacarias, in which a majority of justices determined “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.’”
Although “Congress amended the INA shortly after that decision, including to add what is now Section 1252(b)(4)(B), “those amendments … codified the Elias-Zacarias standard,” rather than rejecting it, Jackson noted in her ruling.
She said the law requires courts to uphold those findings unless the evidence clearly compels a different conclusion.
“The agency’s determination … is generally ‘conclusive unless any reasonable adjudicator would be compelled to conclude to the contrary,’” Jackson wrote.
Based on “the force of Elias-Zacarias and [the statutes’] enactment history,” Jackson concluded, the substantial-evidence standard has to apply, SCOTUS Blog said.