For Asylum Purposes, Persecution Because A Person Has “Membership In A Particular Social Group” May Include The Person’s Family.

To be eligible for asylum relief, a petitioner is required to establish refugee status, i.e., that he is an alien unwilling or unable to return home “because of persecution or a well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.” [entered the United States without inspection on September 10, 2007.] On June 15, 2009, gang members killed his father outside of his father’s Evangelical Christian church in Guatemala. Petitioner’s cousin witnessed the murder and agreed to testify against the perpetrators. She was murdered the day before the hearing. Petitioner asserts that she was killed in retaliation for her willingness to cooperate with the authorities and to prevent her appearance as a witness against the gang members who killed his father. In the wake of his cousin’s death, petitioner’s sister began receiving threats, even though she had neither witnessed the attack on her father nor agreed to testify against the gang members responsible. Due to these threats, she felt compelled to flee to the United States. Both an immigration judge and the Board of Immigration Appeals [BIA] denied petitioner’s plea for asylum relief. Noting that “membership in a particular social group” is an enigmatic and difficult to define term, the Ninth Circuit remanded the matter, stating: “In the face of [petitioner’s] social group claim and the evidence that gang members killed [his] father, murdered his cousin and threatened his sister, the BIA erred in not addressing the family aspect of [petitioner’s] social group claim.” (Rios v. Loretta E. Lynch, Attorney General  (Ninth Cir.; December 1, 2015) (Case No. 12-72551).)