NOT PRECEDENTIAL UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE THIRD CIRCUIT _______________ No. 18-2664 _______________ OLUWATOMIWA BABATUNDE ADEJIMI, Petitioner v. ATTORNEY GENERAL UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, Respondent _______________ On Petition for Review of a Decision of the United States Department of Justice Board of Immigration Appeals (A212-974-627) Immigration Judge: Daniel A. Morris _______________ Submitted Under Third Circuit L.A.R. 34.1(a) on March 21, 2019 Before: SHWARTZ, KRAUSE, and BIBAS, Circuit Judges (Filed: July 24, 2019) _______________ OPINION* _______________ * This disposition is not an opinion of the full Court and, under I.O.P. 5.7, is not binding precedent. BIBAS, Circuit Judge. Aliens often testify at their own removal proceedings. But immigration judges can ask aliens to corroborate their testimony. If an alien fails to do so and does not explain that failure, the judge can deny his claim to asylum. That is what happened here. An immigration judge found that Oluwatomiwa Adejimi’s corroborating documents were forged, and his testimony had no other support. So the judge denied his application for asylum. Because this holding rested on substantial evidence, we will deny Adejimi’s petition for review. I. BACKGROUND Adejimi, a Nigerian citizen, came to the United States in June 2017. Border Patrol agents interviewed him at the airport. He first told the agents that he had come to the United States for a training program at American University. He showed an invitation from the university and a student ID card from a school in Nigeria. But the university had not offered this training program for at least two years. After the agents discovered his lie, Adejimi admitted that he had paid hundreds of dollars for the fake invitation and ID card. He then told the agents that he feared going back to Nigeria because “people in Nigeria were ritualistic.” AR 222. A few months later, Adejimi applied for asylum. To support his claim, he submitted six letters: one from his high school dated 2004, one from a hospital dated 2017, and four from different witnesses dated 2017. He gave the government original copies of these 2 documents. The Department of Homeland Security then sent them to a lab for analysis to determine their authenticity. The lab report highlighted the letters’ suspicious irregularities: Even though the letters from the school and the hospital were supposedly written by two different people thirteen years apart, the lab found that they were printed on the same printer. The letters from four different witnesses were likewise printed on the same printer as one another. The signature on the hospital letter “contain[ed] characteristics consistent with unnatural writing.” AR 264. And the numbers written at the bottom of two of the witness letters shared similar handwriting, “indicating that they were probably written by the same individual.” Id. In December 2017, Adejimi had an asylum hearing. At the hearing, Adejimi admitted that he had “lie[d]” when he told Border Patrol Agents that he feared returning to Nigeria because “people in Nigeria were ritualistic.” AR 224. Instead, he said that he had ...
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