Not for Publication in West's Federal Reporter United States Court of Appeals For the First Circuit No. 20-1477 BETZY MILEA GONZALEZ BARRERA, Petitioner, v. MERRICK B. GARLAND,* UNITED STATES ATTORNEY GENERAL, Respondent. PETITION FOR REVIEW OF AN ORDER OF THE BOARD OF IMMIGRATION APPEALS Before Howard, Chief Judge, Selya and Kayatta, Circuit Judges. Jeffrey B. Rubin, Todd C. Pomerleau, Kimberly A. Williams, and Rubin Pomerleau PC on brief for petitioner. Jeffrey Bossert Clark, Acting Assistant Attorney General, Civil Division, United States Department of Justice, Emily Anne Radford, Assistant Director, Office of Immigration Litigation, and David J. Schor, Trial Attorney, Office of Immigration Litigation, on brief for respondent. * Pursuant to Fed. R. App. P. 43(c)(2), Attorney General Merrick B. Garland has been substituted for former Attorney General William P. Barr as the respondent. May 17, 2021 PER CURIAM. After careful consideration of the administrative record, the decisions of the immigration judge (IJ) and the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA), and the parties' briefs, we summarily deny the petition for judicial review. We add only a few brief comments. With respect to the petitioner's due process claim, the record bears out that the IJ limited the time allotted for direct examination. Nevertheless, the IJ announced this limitation after the petitioner's counsel told the IJ that the petitioner was only going to testify to matters already covered in her written submissions. Perhaps more importantly, the petitioner does not indicate what other information she would have provided had she been permitted to testify at greater length on direct examination. Since a due process violation requires a showing of prejudice, see Lopez-Reyes v. Gonzales, 496 F.3d 20, 23 (1st Cir. 2007) ("Absent cognizable prejudice, there is no due process claim."), this omission alone is fatal to her due process claim. So, too, the petitioner's claims for asylum and withholding of removal fail. In her testimony and her accompanying submissions, the petitioner admitted that she did not know who threatened her or why she was threatened. According to her account, the written threat that she received was anonymous and the persons that she heard on her rooftop were unknown to her. Absent some evidence tying the alleged harm to a statutorily - 3 - protected ground, her claims for asylum and withholding of removal are unavailing. See 8 U.S.C. § 1231(b)(3)(A); Sanchez-Vasquez v. Garland, 994 F.3d 40, 47 (1st Cir. 2021) (stating, with respect to an asylum claim, that "[a] causal connection exists only if the statutorily protected ground...was 'one central reason' for the harm alleged" (quoting Singh v. Mukasey, 543 F.3d 1, 5 (1st Cir. 2008)); see also Lopez de Hincapie v. Gonzales, 494 F.3d 213, 220 (1st Cir. 2007) (indicating that similar nexus requirement applies to withholding of removal). Nor does the petitioner's claim under the United Nations Convention Against Torture (CAT) demand a different result. With respect to that claim, she makes no developed argument in her appellate brief beyond her due process claim (which we already have rejected). This lack of …
Original document
Source: All recent Immigration Decisions In All the U.S. Courts of Appeals