Background
Aldenir Pereira Alves, Cristiana Barros Alves, and their two minor children, all Brazilian citizens, entered the United States without authorization in October 2021. They sought asylum, withholding of removal, and protection under the Convention Against Torture, alleging that two Brazilian military police officers had threatened and mistreated Cristiana’s family because of her brother Jaider’s gang involvement. Cristiana witnessed officers threaten relatives, damage furniture, arrest her sister Poliana, and beat her brother Robson, but the officers never came to the petitioners’ own home, and none of the petitioners was physically harmed or arrested.
An immigration judge found the petitioners credible but concluded that their experiences did not amount to past persecution and that their fear of future persecution was not objectively reasonable. The BIA majority affirmed, reasoning in part that the harm to Cristiana’s siblings was limited and indirect as to the petitioners and that the police activity occurred at the mother’s home, where Jaider had lived. One BIA member dissented, favoring remand to consider the relevance of the IJ’s later grant of asylum to Poliana and expressing concern that the IJ had improperly treated internal relocation as the petitioners’ burden. The BIA later denied the petitioners’ motions to reopen and reconsider, and the First Circuit consolidated their two petitions for review.
The Court’s Holding
The First Circuit denied both petitions. Applying substantial-evidence review, it upheld the agency’s finding that the petitioners had not suffered past persecution. Cristiana’s threats of arrest were unfulfilled and were not shown to have caused significant actual suffering or harm; Aldenir and the children were not threatened; and none of the petitioners was physically harmed or arrested. The record also did not compel a finding that the officers harmed Cristiana’s siblings for the purpose of harming the petitioners themselves.
The court likewise upheld the finding that the petitioners lacked an objectively reasonable fear of future persecution. The officers never visited their nearby home, the petitioners remained in Brazil without harm or threats for more than a year after the last police visit identified in Cristiana’s testimony, and the record supported the agency’s view that the officers had focused on the mother’s house because Cristiana’s brothers lived there and were suspected of crimes. Addressing the BIA dissent’s relocation concern, the court agreed with the majority that the IJ had not made an internal-relocation finding: merely avoiding the mother’s house would not require the petitioners to relocate.
The court also held that the BIA did not abuse its discretion by declining to remand based on Poliana’s asylum grant. The submitted form order contained no reasoning, and known differences—including Poliana’s arrest and residence in the targeted home—supported treating her case differently. Because the petitioners failed to satisfy the lower asylum standard, their withholding claim necessarily failed. They waived any challenge to the denial of reconsideration and to the BIA’s treatment of the sisters’ new affidavits by failing to develop those arguments.
Key Takeaways
- Unfulfilled threats ordinarily do not establish past persecution unless they are sufficiently menacing to cause significant actual suffering or harm.
- Violence against relatives is not necessarily persecution of an asylum applicant; the record must support that the relatives were harmed to target or affect the applicant.
- A relative’s unexplained asylum grant does not establish that another applicant is similarly situated, particularly when the cases involve materially different personal experiences.
Why It Matters
The decision illustrates the substantial-evidence deference given to agency determinations about whether alleged harm crosses the persecution threshold and whether fear of future harm is objectively reasonable. It also shows that an inconsistent-looking outcome in a relative’s asylum case will not by itself justify remand when the grant is unexplained and the applicants’ circumstances differ.
The opinion additionally clarifies that avoiding a particular family residence is not necessarily an internal-relocation determination, especially when the applicants already lived elsewhere nearby and the agency found no past persecution or well-founded fear of future persecution.