Supreme Court unanimously sides with U.S. government in judicial review of asylum case
Kelsey Dallas for SCOTUSBlog writes on the Supreme Court's unanimous decision yesterday in Urias-Orellana v. Bondi. In an opinion by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the Court held that the courts of appeals must use a deferential standard of review when reviewing the Board of Immigration Appeals’ (BIA) determination that asylum seekers did not suffer the persecution necessary to qualify for asylum.
Douglas Humberto Urias-Orellana, his wife Sayra Iliana Gamez-Mejia, and their child, who fled to the United States in 2021 from El Salvador. Urias-Orellana claimed that the family should receive asylum because they had been pursued by a hit man who had shot two of his half-brothers. Men working with this sicario had demanded money and once physically assaulted him.
The court held that the Immigration and Nationality Act requires appellate courts to apply the deferential substantial-evidence standard As Justice Jackson explained, 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.’” The Court reaffirmed its 1992 holding in INS v. Elias-Zacarias, in which the court 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.’” Congress later codified the Elias-Zacarias standard.
