Sitting en banc, the First Circuit has criticized the agency’s reliance on reports from a gang database used by the Boston Police Department, finding insufficient evidence that the documents used to label the petitioner as a gang member were actually probative of gang membership. The court noted that the reports from the database “show no more than a teenager engaged in quintessential teenage behavior -- hanging out with friends and classmates. These social encounters occurred in unremarkable neighborhood locations for this peer group: at a park, at school, in front of one teenager's home, on the benches in an empty stadium. The record lacks any evidence as to why assigning points for those interactions was a reliable means of determining gang membership. Certainly, the fact that the young men were all Hispanic does not permit an inference that any, or all, of them were gang members.”
The full text of Diaz Ortiz v. Garland can be found here:
http://media.ca1.uscourts.gov/pdf.opinions/19-1620P2-01A.pdf
My post about the original 3-judge panel decision in this case (which permitted reliance on the gang database documents) can be found here:
https://www.sabrinadamast.com/journal/2020/5/25/first-circuit-permits-reliance-on-gang-database