United States Court of Appeals For the Eighth Circuit ___________________________ No. 19-3480 ___________________________ Abdirizak Mohamed Ahmed Petitioner v. Merrick B. Garland, Attorney General of the United States Respondent ____________ Petition for Review of an Order of the Board of Immigration Appeals ____________ Submitted: October 22, 2020 Filed: April 8, 2021 ____________ Before COLLOTON, GRASZ, and STRAS, Circuit Judges. ____________ STRAS, Circuit Judge. Abdirizak Ahmed challenges his removability and seeks asylum. The Board of Immigration Appeals ruled against him on both fronts. We deny Ahmed’s petition for review. I. Ahmed, a Somali native, came to the United States in 2000. Part of a minority Islamic sect called Sufism, he fled Somalia to escape the country’s civil war. His entire family now resides in the United States, including his nine children. While here, Ahmed has committed a number of crimes, including three for possession of khat, a controlled substance that contains a known stimulant. See Minn. Stat. § 152.025, subd. 2(1) (criminalizing the possession of various controlled substances, including cathinone and cathine). Criminal convictions often have immigration consequences, and this case is no exception. After his third conviction, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers arrested Ahmed at his home. Then, just days later, the Department of Homeland Security charged him as removable by filing a notice to appear—basically, the immigration equivalent of a complaint. See 8 U.S.C. § 1227(a)(2)(B)(i) (allowing for the deportation of an alien who has been convicted of a controlled-substance offense). At first, the proceedings focused on whether Ahmed was removable. The immigration judge concluded that he was not because Minnesota’s fifth-degree- possession statute was “categorically overbroad and indivisible.” The Board reached the opposite conclusion, however, and vacated the decision. When the case returned to an immigration judge, Ahmed initially sought cancellation of removal and then asylum. The latter request succeeded at first when the judge concluded that Ahmed had a well-founded fear of future persecution based on his Sufi religion, imputed political opinion, and membership in a particular social group “of individuals with mental health illnesses, specifically [post-traumatic stress disorder].” Yet again, the Board disagreed. It concluded, based on the record, that individuals with post-traumatic stress disorder did not make up “a distinct social -2- group”; that Ahmed could safely relocate within Somalia; and “that the Somali government ha[d] undertaken significant efforts to combat al-Shabaab,” which was the group most likely to religiously and politically persecute him. In his petition for review, Ahmed asks us to overturn the Board’s decisions declaring him removable and denying asylum. II. Our “scope of review” here is “narrow[].” Kassim v. Barr, 954 F.3d 1138, 1140 (8th Cir. 2020). Except for constitutional claims and questions of law, “no court [has] jurisdiction to review [the] final order of removal” if an alien is removable for having committed one or more criminal offenses. 8 U.S.C. § 1252(a)(2)(C), (D). This limitation is commonly known as the criminal-alien bar. See Rendon v. Barr, 952 F.3d 963, 967–68, 970 (8th Cir. 2020). For the most part, Ahmed’s arguments fall …
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