Hadeel Khalasawi v. Merrick B. Garland

• Court: Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit
• Decided: October 5, 2023
• Docket: 23-3352
• Status: Unpublished

Opinion

NOT RECOMMENDED FOR PUBLICATION File Name: 23a0426n.06

No. 23-3352

UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE SIXTH CIRCUIT FILED Oct 05, 2023 HADEEL KHALASAWI, ) DEBORAH S. HUNT, Clerk ) Petitioner, ) ) v. ON PETITION FOR REVIEW ) FROM THE UNITED STATES ) MERRICK B. GARLAND, Attorney General, BOARD OF IMMIGRATION ) Respondent. APPEALS ) )

Before: SUTTON, Chief Judge; KETHLEDGE and READLER, Circuit Judges.

KETHLEDGE, Circuit Judge. Hadeel Khalasawi petitions for review of the Board of

Immigration Appeals’ denial of his third motion to reopen his order of removal. We deny the

petition for nearly the same reasons we denied his petition as to his second motion to reopen.

We recited the relevant facts in our last opinion in Khalasawi’s case. See Khalasawi v.

Garland, No. 19-3339/21-3895, 2022 WL 2679048, at *1 (6th Cir. July 12, 2022). To summarize:

Khalasawi is an Iraqi-born Christian who has compiled a substantial criminal record while in the

United States. An immigration judge ordered him removed in 1998. The Board reopened his case

in 2018; an immigration judge denied his application for deferral of removal under the Convention

Against Torture; and the Board affirmed. Khalasawi then filed a second motion to reopen, which

the Board denied. Khalasawi petitioned this court for relief as to both of the Board’s decisions;

we denied both petitions just last year. Khalasawi promptly filed another motion to reopen, which

the Board again denied, finding that Khalasawi’s evidence did not show that conditions in Iraq had No. 23-3352, Khalasawi v. Garland

materially changed since the immigration judge’s 2018 decision. See 8 U.S.C.

§ 1229a(c)(7)(C)(ii). Khalasawi then filed this petition for review.

We review the Board’s denial of Khalasawi’s motion for an abuse of discretion. Trujillo

Diaz v. Sessions, 880 F.3d 244, 248 (6th Cir. 2018). We see none on this record. Khalasawi

presents nearly the same arguments and evidence that he presented to us last time. His expert is

different, but the expert’s conclusions are virtually the same. And the reports that Khalasawi cites

show a continuation of adverse circumstances, not a material worsening of them. The 2021 State

Department report, for example, said that violence against religious minorities “remained

widespread” in Iraq and that “discrimination continued to stoke ethno-sectarian tensions[.]” Those

statements simply do not compel a conclusion that conditions in Iraq have gotten worse since the

immigration judge denied relief on the merits in 2018. We can only conclude, therefore, that the

Board did not abuse its discretion when it determined that Khalasawi’s new evidence failed to

demonstrate that conditions had materially changed in Iraq.

Khalasawi’s remaining two arguments are without merit. Khalasawi argues that the Board

misstated the standard for materiality when it denied his motion. He is mistaken: the standard for

reopening requires a “material change in country conditions[,]” see, e.g., Dieng v. Barr, 947 F.3d

956, 962 (6th Cir. 2020); and that is the standard the Board applied here. Nor is Khalasawi entitled

to relief on the ground that Detroit immigration judges have granted relief to other Chaldean

Christians. None of those decisions came on a motion to reopen, and thus none of them involved

the same standard we apply here.

* * *

Khalasawi’s petition is denied.