Jhoan Sebastian Ruano-Flautero v. Pamela Bondi

• Court: Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit
• Decided: July 15, 2025
• Docket: 24-4015
• Status: Unpublished

Opinion

NOT RECOMMENDED FOR PUBLICATION File Name: 25a0346n.06

Case No. 24-4015

UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE SIXTH CIRCUIT FILED Jul 15, 2025 ) JHOAN SEBASTIAN RUANO-FLAUTERO; KELLY L. STEPHENS, Clerk ANGY MARCELA SUAREZ-YELA; J.M.T.S. ) ) Petitioners, ) ON PETITION FOR REVIEW ) FROM THE UNITED STATES v. ) BOARD OF IMMIGRATION ) APPEALS PAMELA BONDI, Attorney General, ) Respondent. ) OPINION )

Before: THAPAR, NALBANDIAN, and READLER, Circuit Judges

NALBANDIAN, Circuit Judge. Jhoan Ruano-Flautero and Angy Suarez-Yela seek

asylum and withholding of removal, which the Board of Immigration Appeals refused. Because

the record supports the agency’s decision, we deny the petition.

I.

Ruano-Flautero and Suarez-Yela, Colombian citizens, entered the United States unlawfully

in 2022. The couple brought with them Suarez-Yela’s minor son, J.M.T.S., from a previous

relationship. But shortly after they arrived, the government began removal proceedings against

them.

They asked for asylum and withholding of removal. Ruano-Flautero claimed that he’d

been persecuted for participating in anti-government protests, while Suarez-Yela claimed that the

Colombian police refused to protect her from her abusive ex-boyfriend (J.M.T.S’s father). But an No .24-4015, Ruano Flautero v. Bondi

Immigration Judge (IJ) denied their request. Among other reasons, he found Ruano-Flautero not

credible based on discrepancies between his testimony and application papers. And he concluded

that Suarez-Yela hadn’t met the asylum standard—she had neither proposed a cognizable social

group nor shown that that the police left her helpless.

The couple appealed to the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA), which affirmed largely

on those grounds. The BIA upheld the IJ’s credibility and police-assistance findings. And it left

in place the IJ’s ruling against Suarez-Yela’s proposed social group because she didn’t

meaningfully contest it on appeal. So the couple petitioned for review here.

II.

To gain asylum, an alien must be a “refugee.” 8 U.S.C. § 1158(b)(1)(B)(i). Federal law

defines a “refugee” as someone “who is unable or unwilling” to return to his home country

“because of persecution or a well-founded fear of persecution” on account of certain traits, like

“membership in a particular social group.” Id. § 1101(a)(42). “Persecution” has a state-action

component. The country’s government must either (1) directly persecute the alien, or (2) be unable

or unwilling to prevent private actors from persecuting him. Palucho v. Garland, 49 F.4th 532,

535–36 (6th Cir. 2022). The alien bears the burden of proof to establish refugee status. 8 U.S.C.

§ 1158(b)(1)(B)(i). And if he doesn’t carry that burden, any request for withholding of removal

necessarily fails, too. Vasquez-Rivera v. Garland, 96 F.4th 903, 908 (6th Cir. 2024).

We review the BIA’s ruling as the final agency action, though when the BIA adopts the

IJ’s rationale, we review the IJ’s decision too. Id. at 907. We review any factual findings “highly

deferential[ly],” for substantial evidence. Owusu v. Garland, 91 F.4th 460, 463 (6th Cir. 2024)

(internal quotation marks omitted); Cruz-Guzman v. Barr, 920 F.3d 1033, 1035 (6th Cir. 2019).

So “unless the evidence compels a different result,” we cannot second-guess the agency, even if

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we would’ve made a different call in the first instance. Owusu, 91 F.4th at 463 (internal quotation

marks omitted); see 8 U.S.C. § 1252(b)(4)(B).

A.

We first consider Ruano-Flautero. His claim for asylum rests on alleged political-opinion

persecution at the hands of Colombian police after he attended anti-government protests. Citing

inconsistencies between his testimony and asylum application, the BIA found him not credible.

Credibility findings are factual findings, and we afford them great deference. They can

rest on inconsistencies, inaccuracies, or falsehoods, which need not go to the heart of the alien’s

claim. See Luna-Romero v. Barr, 949 F.3d 292, 295 (6th Cir. 2020). Still, an adverse credibility

decision “must be supported by specific reasons.” Ventura-Reyes v. Lynch, 797 F.3d 348, 359 (6th

Cir. 2015), abrogated on other grounds by Nasrallah v. Barr, 590 U.S. 573, 578–79 (2020). But

if it is, then that decision is generally “fatal to claims for asylum and relief from removal,

preventing such claims from being considered on their merits.” Slyusar v. Holder, 740 F.3d 1068,

1072 (6th Cir. 2014).

The record contains a few discrepancies in Ruano-Flautero’s story, which the BIA

reasonably relied on in doubting his credibility. First, Ruano-Flutero couldn’t quite settle on the

dates and facts of the protests he attended. And second, when testifying before the IJ, he added

new details about his post-protest harassment by the police (details not in his application), which

one could reasonably interpret as embellishment.

Start with the protest timeline. In his asylum application, Ruano-Flautero wrote that he

attended two protests in 2021. And he specified that police fired tear gas at him at the first protest.

But he later told the IJ that he attended one protest in 2019, and another in 2021. That’s a difference

of years, not mere days or months. He also stated that police tear gassed him at the second protest,

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not the first. A third version of the story appears in Ruano-Flautero’s official declaration—where

he identified only one protest he attended, in 2021. When asked by the IJ to explain these

inconsistencies, Ruano-Flautero didn’t offer a clear answer. He said that someone had died at the

2019 protest, which had led him to head home early, and that he stuck around longer at the second

protest (which, to keep confusing things, he called the “2022” protest). That might explain why

Ruano-Flautero was tear gassed at one protest, and not the other. But it doesn’t address why

Ruano-Flautero used different dates and reversed the tear gas incidents between his application

and his testimony. And non-answers, unsatisfactory answers, or vague answers suffice for an

adverse credibility finding. See Luna-Romero, 949 F.3d at 296; Gjonaj v. Holder, 398 F. App’x

98, 109 (6th Cir. 2010).

The evolving details about police harassment also raised red flags for the BIA. At the

hearing, Ruano-Flautero testified that after he participated in the 2021 protest, the police hounded

him—they stopped and searched him, asked for his papers, called him names, and even assaulted

him. When asked how often these incidents took place, he described them as “quite habitual,”

“between 20 to 25 times.” A.R. 356. He stated that most incidents took place in front of his house,

with family watching and his mother-in-law sometimes intervening. But these events weren’t

detailed in Ruano-Flautero’s application or declaration.

Nor did they appear in the letter his mother-in-law wrote supporting his petition. While

Ruano-Flautero testified that his mother-in-law repeatedly witnessed the police harassing him, and

that she “would frequently come out to [his] defense,” A.R. 358, she mentioned no such thing in

the letter she wrote to the agency. She described the protests and tear gas in detail, and even noted

that after the protests, the police would follow and beat young people in the street—but did not

mention the same thing happening to her own son-in-law or her own intervention. These

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inconsistencies struck the BIA as odd. And they provided reasonable grounds for questioning

whether Ruano-Flautero was exaggerating or embellishing his story. See Kolov v. Garland, 78

F.4th 911, 922 (6th Cir. 2023) (one “could reasonably interpret . . . evolving claims as not credible,

devised only to strengthen [the alien’s] claim as it proceeded,” when he “added new instances of

ethnic harassment as his claim proceeded,” “despite opportunity to disclose each” from the start),

abrogated on other grounds by Riley v. Bondi, 145 S. Ct. 2190 (2025); Luna-Romero, 949 F.3d at

296 (alien not being entirely “accurate and forthcoming” supported adverse credibility finding

(internal quotation marks omitted)).

Ruano-Flautero offers several explanations for the timeline mix-up and the omitted

harassment details. The timeline issue could be a “typographical error in his application that was

prepared through a translator,” he suggests. Petitioners Br. at 17–18. Or he merely

“misremembered when the first protest took place.” Id. at 18. And in any event, he adds, these

details weren’t “important to [his] substantive testimony.” Id. As for the missing details about

police harassment, Ruano-Flautero claims that he didn’t think them important enough to include

on his application form but that he shouldn’t be penalized for not offering every detail up front.

Id. at 21. He also maintains that one sentence in his declaration did refer to the police harassment

he experienced, and that the BIA simply misread it. Id. at 21–22.

These explanations cannot overcome our deferential review. To start, the declaration’s

sentence (composed in broken English) reads ambiguously—it mentions “a moment” (singular)

after the 2021 protest in which “police were chasing you to hit you or take you away.” A.R. at

465. While theoretically susceptible to a reading that refers specifically to Ruano-Flautero, and

that “a” moment could’ve meant “many,” that’s not the only possible reading. Nor is it the most

obvious one. The agency could’ve reasonably read this sentence to refer instead to the police

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generally tailing young people as the protesting masses dispersed, not specifically tracking Ruano-

Flautero for months afterward.

The rest of his explanations are also plausible—but not overwhelming or inescapable. And

“a plausible explanation is not enough on appeal to overcome an adverse credibility

determination.” Luna-Romero, 949 F.3d at 296–97 (internal quotation marks omitted). We grant

that someone could have mistyped a date. Or that Ruano-Flautero could have misremembered the

dates. Or that he could have thought certain details less important than others. But mere

possibilities don’t pass our standard of review.

The BIA gave “specific reasons” for its findings, Ventura-Reyes, 797 F.3d at 359, and the

record—on our own review—doesn’t “compel a different result,” Owusu, 91 F.4th at 463 (citation

modified). So Ruano-Flautero’s claim can’t succeed.

B.

We next consider Suarez-Yela. Her claim for asylum stems from her past relationship with

an abusive and violent ex-boyfriend, Jayson. The IJ found that her proposed protected social

group—“Colombian females unable to leave their relationship”—wasn’t cognizable and that the

government wasn’t unable or unwilling to protect her.

Suarez-Yela did not “meaningfully challenge[]” the IJ’s social-group decision before the

BIA. A.R. 5. Though her brief now argues that the IJ erred, she doesn’t challenge the BIA’s ruling

that she failed to develop the issue. This means that she left it unexhausted at the administrative

level, and we do not review unexhausted issues. See Harmon v. Holder, 758 F.3d 728, 737 (6th

Cir. 2014); see also 8 U.S.C. § 1252(d)(1) (requiring “exhaust[ion of] all administrative

remedies”).

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We also decline to overturn the BIA’s finding on the police-protection question (another

factual finding that we review deferentially, see Palucho, 49 F.4th at 536). Since Jayson isn’t a

state actor, Suarez-Yela faced a high burden. She had to show that she couldn’t “reasonably expect

the assistance of the government in deterring” him. Id. (internal quotation marks omitted). Put

differently, she had to show that the government either “condoned the private violence” or

“demonstrated a complete helplessness” in protecting her. Id. (internal quotation marks omitted).

Jayson clearly inflicted appalling physical and psychological abuse on Suarez-Yela during

their relationship. The record shows that for years, he constantly beat her, insulted her, and

threatened her. He often did so in the presence of their young son, J.M.T.S. Jayson once stabbed

her in the leg for no apparent reason and smashed a beer bottle over her head. Eventually she

secured a restraining order against him, but he violated it multiple times, breaking down her door

and at times taking away J.M.T.S. Suarez-Yela testified that he made her life “hell.” A.R. 297.

Eventually, Jayson left her and started dating another woman, but he threatened to kill Suarez-

Yela or “throw acid” on her face if she dated another man. Id. at 308. This kind of problem

appears to plague the country, too. For example, the record contains the U.S. State Department’s

2021 Human Rights Report, which details how domestic abuse and violence against women

“continue[s] to be a problem” in Colombia. Id. at 533.

But, as the BIA found, the record also makes clear that law enforcement didn’t sit around

and do nothing. Whenever Suarez-Yela called the police on Jayson, they came and removed him

from her home. Sometimes, they even beat him. The final time Jayson appeared at her house

before she left Colombia, she called the police on him and he “took off running.” Id. at 317. Other

times, she didn’t call the police at all. But she testified that any time she did call—which she

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estimated was about one hundred times over the years—the police always came. So the evidence

cuts multiple ways, which doesn’t permit us to substitute our judgment for the BIA’s.

And while Colombia has a domestic-violence problem, the Human Rights Report also

notes that the government hasn’t neglected it. Several national agencies, including the Attorney

General’s office and the Ministry of Defense, have special programs to combat violence against

women, and the country tries to enforce its laws against sexual assault. We’ve held that similar

country conditions don’t require a finding of state-sanctioned persecution. See Palucho, 49 F.4th

at 537 (collecting cases).

It’s possible that there was more that law enforcement could have done to help Suarez-

Yela. She testified that they never handcuffed or arrested Jayson. And he was never prosecuted.

Yet that doesn’t negate the fact that the police did something to help her, and the persecution

standard asks whether they did next to nothing. E.g., Reyes Almendarez v. Barr, 817 F. App’x 35,

41 (6th Cir. 2020) (“Local police were responsive to each of petitioners’ crises,” even though “no

arrests were made, nor charges brought,” so the alien couldn’t establish state-sanctioned

persecution). We can’t say that the police “condoned [Jayson’s] violence” or “demonstrated a

complete helplessness” in trying to protect Suarez-Yela, Palucho, 49 F.4th at 536 (internal

quotation marks omitted); the record doesn’t compel that result. So Suarez-Yela’s claim can’t

succeed.

III.

For these reasons, we deny the petition.