Najah Gorges Elias v. Alberto R. Gonzales, United States Attorney General

490 F.3d 444, 2007 U.S. App. LEXIS 14010, 2007 WL 1713323
CourtCourt of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit
DecidedJune 15, 2007
Docket06-3366
StatusPublished
Cited by36 cases

This text of 490 F.3d 444 (Najah Gorges Elias v. Alberto R. Gonzales, United States Attorney General) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
Najah Gorges Elias v. Alberto R. Gonzales, United States Attorney General, 490 F.3d 444, 2007 U.S. App. LEXIS 14010, 2007 WL 1713323 (6th Cir. 2007).

Opinions

OPINION

PER CURIAM.

In this asylum case, petitioner Najah Gorges Elias, a native of Iraq and Chaldean Christian, seeks reversal of a Board of Immigration Appeals (“BIA”) decision dismissing his appeal from an oral decision of an Immigration Judge (“IJ”). For the following reasons, we grant the petition for review, vacate the decision of the BIA, and remand for a new hearing before another IJ.

I.

At the time of his removal hearing on October 20, 2004, petitioner was a thirty-one year old male citizen of Iraq who entered the United States on or about May 1, 2003, in or near Detroit, Michigan. He is an ethnic Chaldean who practices the Catholic religion. In addition to being identified as a “minority religion” in Iraq, there is evidence that Assyrian and Chaldean Christians are considered by other Iraqis to constitute a distinct non-Arab ethnic minority.

Petitioner entered the country on a visa that identified him as the fiancé of a United States citizen and allowed him to stay in the country until July 80, 2003. Petitioner and his fiancée decided not to get married, and petitioner stayed in the country beyond July 30, 2003. Petitioner conceded removeability, but sought relief from removal through an application for asylum, which is also considered an application for non-discretionary withholding of removal. Petitioner also applied for relief from withholding of removal pursuant to Article 3 of the United Nations Convention Against Torture (“CAT”).

At the removal hearing, the parties and the interpreter were all present in a courtroom in Detroit, Michigan; but the IJ sat in New York City, hearing the case through televideo connection. Petitioner claims that he began to be harassed at the age of 15 when he was forced to attend mandatory religion classes in Islam at his high school. He also testified that on December 12, 1990, he was arrested one day at school for distributing anti-religion and anti-government fliers, which he says he did not do. After this arrest, he was detained for about 33 days at various locations, beaten, and given little food. He was released and returned home, but did not seek any medical treatment. He returned to school on January 17, 1991,1 but he claims he was not allowed to return. His asylum application states that he completed high school in June 1991.

Petitioner testified that he was conscripted into the Iraqi Army in February 1991, and that he was detained for three months, from August 1992 until November 1992, when he was found reading the Bible in his barracks.

Petitioner testified that he left Iraq in November 1998 due to fear that he would be harmed by Baath Party members based on two incidents in November 1998. In the first incident, petitioner intervened when some Baath Party members began to harass female members of petitioner’s church as they left church on Sunday, November 1, 1998. He drove the harassers off, but petitioner claims that they [447]*447swore to get revenge on him. Petitioner became involved in another encounter with Baath Party officials on November 12, 1998, after they harassed his sister and her friend outside the store where he worked. An altercation ensued and a Baath Party member pulled a gun, but petitioner was not injured. Petitioner’s brother was arrested and detained.

After the second incident, petitioner’s family decided that petitioner needed to leave Iraq. A false passport was obtained, and petitioner testified that he left Iraq for Jordan on November 29, 1998. He remained in Jordan until March 2002. He then traveled to Malta where his family had arranged for him to marry a native-born United States citizen whose family was from Malta. Although he had spoken on the phone to the woman, this was the first time they met. He then traveled to the United States on a visa secured by his fiancée, and they planned to marry within a few months of his arrival. Once in the United States, petitioner said he and the woman decided not to marry because she was too “westernized.”

Petitioner’s application for the visa to come to the United States to marry a U.S. citizen stated that he had lived in Amman, Jordan since April 1997, not November 1998. Petitioner signed the application and attested to its truthfulness, but stated at the hearing that he had no idea what the visa application said and that his lawyer had filled it out.

The IJ issued an oral decision at the conclusion of the hearing and found petitioner lacked credibility on issues material to his claim. The judge cited the discrepancy between petitioner’s visa application that said he had been in Amman, Jordan from April 1997 to 2002, and petitioner’s hearing testimony that he was in Iraq until November 1998 when he then fled to Jordan after the altercation with the Baath party members. We acknowledge the confusion around this issue — with the visa application saying he left Iraq in April 1997, his passport bearing an issuance date of September 1998 and petitioner testifying that he did not request or receive the passport until November 1998.2 Based on these discrepancies, the IJ concluded that petitioner was not in Iraq in November 1998 and that he had fabricated the story about the altercation with Baath Party members in November 1998.

The judge also pointed to the discrepancy between the asylum application and petitioner’s testimony concerning when he left high school and joined the Army. Petitioner testified that he was expelled from high school and conscripted into the Army in February 1991, but his application states that he left high school in June 1991. The judge did not believe that petitioner joined the Army in February 1991, because petitioner did not know exactly when the first Gulf War ended and that local uprisings had occurred in Iraq in March and April of 1991. The judge found that if petitioner had been a soldier in the Iraqi Army during this time he would know this information.

The judge also did not believe petitioner’s testimony regarding the genuineness of his engagement to a U.S. citizen whom he had only just met. He found it difficult to believe that petitioner’s family had arranged his marriage to an American woman whose family came from Malta, stating that it looked like the proposed marriage was arranged simply so that petitioner could come to the United States. Despite [448]*448persistent questioning by the IJ, petitioner insisted that the engagement was not a sham, that arranged marriages were not uncommon in his culture, and that he did intend to marry his fiancée when he came to the United States, but that when they got to know each other better, they decided that marriage was not a good decision for them.

The IJ also found the petitioner’s asylum application frivolous, thereby barring a grant of asylum to petitioner forever. The judge also found petitioner was a “persecutor” of others based on some of his duties during his service in the Iraqi Army, which provides another basis to ban petitioner forever from asylum in this country.

As to petitioner’s fear of future persecution should he be returned to Iraq, the IJ noted that during the time of the Hussein regime, Christians were generally not bothered and were allowed to practice their religion freely.

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Bluebook (online)
490 F.3d 444, 2007 U.S. App. LEXIS 14010, 2007 WL 1713323, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/najah-gorges-elias-v-alberto-r-gonzales-united-states-attorney-general-ca6-2007.