The Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) has determined that an applicant’s status as a landowner does not automatically render that alien a member of a particular social group for purposes of asylum and withholding of removal. Instead, the applicant must show that landowners are socially distinct and particularized within the society in question. As an example, “where the particular facts of a case indicate that landownership is linked with another protected ground—for example, political opinion, by exclusively limiting participation in governance and other political activities to landowners—a group of landowners is more likely to have definable boundaries and be viewed by the society in question as a distinct class of persons. The same is true for a group of landowners who pose a threat to a cartel and its interests, given the group’s social prominence or significance, political or otherwise.”
Contradictorily, the BIA then determined that cartels persecuting landowners because they want their land does not demonstrate the requisite nexus to a protected ground. “The country conditions evidence reflects that cartels engage in criminal activity in Guatemala based on their desire to increase their revenue, power, and territorial control. The criminal activity at issue in this case is drug cultivation and distribution, rendering vulnerable those, like the respondent, who have a resource—in this case, land—that the cartels wish to exploit in order to benefit their operations. Such circumstances are not substantially different from a situation where a criminal is motivated by the theft of desired goods. It is well settled, however, that such a situation does not qualify as persecution on account of a particular social group.”
“The respondent’s proposed social groups necessarily focus on his status as a landowner. But the cartel’s actions reflect that its focus was on the respondent’s land itself, not his landowner status.” It is completely unclear how you would demonstrate a persecutor’s desire to overcome a person’s characteristic as a landowner without demonstrating that the persecutor has some desire for the landowner’s land.
The full text of Matter of E-R-A-L- can be found here:
https://www.justice.gov/eoir/page/file/1247176/download