In the United States Court of Appeals For the Seventh Circuit ____________________ No. 21-1278 IRINEO CUENCA BRITO, Petitioner, v. MERRICK GARLAND, Attorney General of the United States, Respondent. ____________________ Petition for Review of an Order of the Board of Immigration Appeals. No. A205-990-502 ____________________ ARGUED NOVEMBER 8, 2021 — DECIDED JULY 7, 2022 ____________________ Before SCUDDER, KIRSCH, and JACKSON-AKIWUMI, Circuit Judges. SCUDDER, Circuit Judge. Irineo Cuenca Brito, a citizen of Mexico, seeks our review of a decision by the Board of Immi- gration Appeals denying his petition for deferral of removal under the United Nations Convention Against Torture. He advances three legal challenges to that decision. But seeing no legal error, we deny Brito’s petition for review. 2 No. 21-1278 I A Irineo Brito first unlawfully entered the United States in or before 2013. On June 3, 2013, the Department of Homeland Security ordered him removed. Brito then illegally reentered again sometime prior to 2019. And he once again came to the attention of immigration authorities. On July 24, 2019, DHS issued a second notice of removal against him. Brito applied for withholding of removal under the Immi- gration and Nationality Act and withholding or deferral of re- moval under the United Nations Convention Against Torture (often shorthanded as “CAT”), claiming that he would be sub- ject to persecution and torture if removed to Mexico. Those applications led to a hearing before an immigration judge where, in support of his claim, Brito offered his own testi- mony and that of Dr. Harry Vanden, an expert in Mexican car- tels. Brito testified first, explaining that he had fled Mexico be- cause of threats he received from the Familia Michoacan car- tel. He recounted that, sometime in the summer of 2013, ru- mors began to spread around his hometown of Acatlán del Rio that the cartel was coming to the area. Before long, those rumors proved true and members of the cartel made their way into the region. Brito, who worked as a fisherman, de- scribed walking home from work one day when cartel mem- bers confronted and abducted him at gunpoint. He does not know why the cartel sought him out. By Brito’s account, the cartel members then transported him to a boat dock in an ap- parent effort to receive some type of help from him. No. 21-1278 3 Brito’s testimony went on. Near the end of the hours-long captivity, he seized a moment in which his captors were pre- occupied to make his escape. Ignoring the threats the cartel members had made against him to prevent him from leaving, Brito testified that he used a small boat to slip away from the cartel’s grasp. As he fled, he saw bullets hit the water around him. Brito testified that after his escape, he returned to his neighborhood only to find that his home had been ransacked by the cartel. He believed that the upending of his house evi- denced the cartel’s efforts to seek him out. He added that, while …
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