The case originated with Douglas Humberto Urias-Orellana, an illegal immigrant from El Salvador who flew to the US in 2021 and entered an asylum petition, claiming that a drug cartel had threatened his life. An immigration judge ruled that Urias-Orellana's claims did not meet the standard for past persecution or fear of future persecution and subsequently denied his asylum petition and issued a removal order. The Borad of Immigration Appeals (BIA) agreed, denying Urias-Orellana's claim. According to Urias-Orellana's own testimony, he was only threatened with death within his home town in El Salvador, and largely avoided the issue when he relocated to other towns with his family.

Urias-Orellana appealed his case to the Supreme Court, where arguments were made in December. The high court's ruling restores deference to executive branch agencies, clarifies the difference between Article III federal courts and the executive branch, and will likely help prevent asylum fraud and the abuse of US generosity and hospitality.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote the Supreme Court's opinion. Section 1252(b)(4) of 8 US Code, which governs judicial review of orders of removal, specifically delineates the scope and standard of review that appellate courts are to apply when reviewing orders of removal. Notably, as Jackson observed, the relevant statute stipulates that appellate courts "shall decide the petition only on the administrative record on which the order of removal is based" (emphasis added) and that "a decision [by the agency] that [a noncitizen] is not eligible for admission to the United States is conclusive unless manifestly contrary to law."

"Today we resolve the proper-standard question as it relates to the courts of appeals' review of the agency's persecution determination," Jackson wrote. The statute in question "requires courts to review the entirety of the agency's conclusions—both the underlying factual findings and the application of the [Immigration and Naturalization Act (INA)] to those findings—for substantial evidence," she continued. In other words, appellate courts must apply a "substantial evidence" review when asylum cases and the like come before them. In jurisprudential terms, a substantial evidence review does not consist in reweighing the evidence and reaching a different conclusion than the original agency (in this case, the immigration judge and the BIA) did, but in ensuring that there is substantial evidence to reach a conclusion, as opposed to "a mere scintilla." Provided that there is enough evidence to reach a conclusion and that the conclusion reached is not blatantly contradictory to US law, then the appellate courts must defer to the original agency decision.

The Supreme Court reached a similar conclusion in a prior case, Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) v. Elias-Zacarias. The 1992 case centered on Jairo Jonathan Elias-Zacarias, an illegal immigrant from Guatemala who claimed that he was pressured to join a guerilla rebellion against the Guatemalan government but refused for fear of government retaliation. He thus fled to the US. Both an immigration judge and the BIA rejected his asylum application, prompting Elias-Zacarias to appeal to the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which disagreed with the immigration judge and BIA and granted the illegal immigrant's asylum application. The INS (the precursor to today's DHS) appealed the case to the Supreme Court.

In that case, Jackson recounted, the Supreme Court "held 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.'" Under the INA, asylum claims may be granted on account of a petitioner's past pattern of being persecuted or on a "well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion."

In INS v. Elias-Zacarias, the Supreme Court determined that none of these factors applied, thus determining that there was no basis to the illegal immigrant's persecution claim. Elias-Zacarias argued that he was being persecuted "on account of political opinion," but the high court clarified that his "political opinion" was really just not having a political opinion, and that a would-be refugee applying for asylum on political grounds must be expressing a political opinion which results in his persecution. Elias-Zacarias did not meet that standard, thus the Supreme Court agreed with the immigration judge and the BIA.

Shortly after the Supreme Court's 1992 decision, Congress amended the INA to meet the standard set therein. "As such," Jackson observed, "the statute as it reads today requires substantial-evidence review for the entirety of the persecution determination." The Wednesday ruling will make it more difficult for those claiming asylum to succeed in their claims on appeal, as appellate courts are now essentially barred from substituting their own judgments for those of immigration judges and the BIA. The Supreme Court's clarified standard also applies nationwide, resolving circuit court splits and curtailing judge-shopping. Subscribe for free to Breaking Christian News here

S.A. McCarthy serves as a news writer at The Washington Stand.

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