In yet another blow to the asylum system just days before the Trump Administration was set to leave office, the Acting Attorney General issued another decision in Matter of A-B-, the horrendous asylum decision issued by Jeff Sessions that seeks to wipe out all forms of asylum related to non-state actor persecution.
Despite a rather scathing opinion from the DC Circuit to the contrary, the Attorney General doubled down on his claim that “complete helplessness” is the same standard that has always been applied to determine if a government is unable or unwilling to control a persecutor. I cannot even begin to describe the sheer absurdity of this statement.
The Attorney General clarified that“[t]he word ‘persecution’ therefore should be read to require that the government in the home country has fallen so far short of adequate protection as to have breached its basic duty to protect its citizens, or else to have actively harmed them or condoned such harm. Where the government is actively engaged in protecting its citizens, failures in particular cases or high levels of crime do not establish a breach of the government’s duty to protect its citizenry.” Furthermore, if a noncitizen “may reasonably relocate within his home country to avoid persecution, then that may show that the failure to prevent private violence is localized and the foreign country is not itself ‘unwilling or unable’ to prevent persecution. Although evidence of localized police apathy or incompetence may indicate a government’s unwillingness or inability to prevent persecution, in many cases the localized apathy is just that—localized. The applicant may receive effective government protection by relocating within their home country, where the attitudes of local authorities may be different.”
The Attorney General reiterated the two-pronged nexus test laid out by the Board of Immigration Appeals: the applicant’s protected status must be both a but-for cause of her persecution and it must play more than a minor role that is neither incidental nor tangential to another reason for the harm or a means to a non-protected end. Nevertheless, the Attorney General was forced to recognize that Fourth Circuit case law only required that the but-for causation be established.
The full text of the new decision in Matter of A-B- can be found here: