NONPRECEDENTIAL DISPOSITION To be cited only in accordance with Fed. R. App. P. 32.1 United States Court of Appeals For the Seventh Circuit Chicago, Illinois 60604 Argued February 27, 2019 Decided March 26, 2019 Before DIANE P. WOOD, Chief Judge WILLIAM J. BAUER, Circuit Judge ILANA DIAMOND ROVNER, Circuit Judge No. 18-2392 LOVERT TCHOUGOUE Petition for Review of an Order of the Petitioner, Board of Immigration Appeals. v. No. A213-089-410 WILLIAM P. BARR Attorney General of the United States, Respondent. ORDER Lovert Tchougoue, a 22-year-old citizen of Cameroon, petitions for review of the Board of Immigration Appeals’ denial of his application for asylum after he was beaten by police for protesting government policies that have violently divided Francophones and Anglophones. An immigration judge denied relief, finding that Tchougoue was not credible and failed to corroborate his claim of political persecution sufficiently. The No. 18-2392 Page 2 Board assumed that Tchougoue was credible, but affirmed the denial of relief on grounds that he had not established persecution. Because the Board applied the wrong legal standard to Tchougoue’s claim, we grant the petition for review and remand the case for further proceedings. Tchougoue’s asylum claim arises from his involvement in protests against the Cameroon government over the dominance of the French language in the Anglophone region of northwest Cameroon. The increasingly violent conflict between Anglophones and the Francophone majority began in late 2016 when teachers and lawyers in the Anglophone regions, including Tchougoue’s hometown of Bamenda, went on strike for months to protest their marginalization and forced assimilation by the Francophone government. See e.g., U.S. Department of State, 2018 Human Rights Report: Cameroon 1–2. The government responded by arresting and killing protesters, and the crackdown spawned a violent, secessionist movement demanding an independent Anglophone state called Ambazonia. Id. at 1, 3, 9-10. In search of separatists, the government burned homes in the country’s Anglophone regions, and indiscriminately killed civilians, causing hundreds of thousands of Anglophones to flee from Cameroon’s English- speaking northwest and southwest regions. Id. at 15, 22-23; see also U.S. Concerned over Uptick in Violence in Cameroon, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE (Nov. 6, 2018), https://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2018/11/287178.htm. In 2016, when he was a university student in Bamenda, Tchougoue joined a student protest of the government’s use of French in schools. He was arrested by police on November 11, 2016,1 and taken to prison. The police accused him of being a leader of the protests and, for two days, held him in a cell and repeatedly beat, slapped, and kicked him, leaving scars on his body and back. Tchougoue managed to escape and fled to his grandmother’s village ten kilometers away. For the next six months, Tchougoue hid at his grandmother’s house. But on May 23, 2017, upon venturing to a store, he was picked up by another police officer, who, accusing Tchougoue of being a leader of the student protest, arrested him, beat him, slapped him, and forced him into a police car. Again Tchougoue escaped, jumping out of the police car ...
Original document
Source: All recent Immigration Decisions In All the U.S. Courts of Appeals