United States Court of Appeals For the First Circuit Nos. 21-1045 & 21-1616 ADEKUNLE OLUWABUMWI ADEYANJU, Petitioner, v. MERRICK B. GARLAND, Attorney General of the United States, Respondent. PETITIONS FOR REVIEW OF AN ORDER OF THE BOARD OF IMMIGRATION APPEALS Before Thompson, Hawkins,* and Barron, Circuit Judges. SangYeob Kim, with whom Ronald L. Abramson, Emily Assunta White, Shaheen & Gordon P.A., Gilles Bissonnette, Jennifer Lyon, and American Civil Liberties Union of New Hampshire, were on brief, for petitioner. Lindsay Corliss, Trial Attorney, Office of Immigration Litigation, with whom Brian Boynton, Acting Assistant Attorney General, Civil Division, John S. Hogan, Assistant Director, Office of Immigration Litigation, and Kiley Kane, Senior Litigation Counsel, Office of Immigration Litigation, were on brief, for respondent. * Of the Ninth Circuit, sitting by designation. February 24, 2022 THOMPSON, Circuit Judge. When the Board of Immigration Appeals ("BIA") considers an appeal, it is bound, as we are, by certain standards of review. It reviews factual findings of an Immigration Judge ("IJ") only for clear error. But it is free to conduct discretionary-relief determinations based on those factual findings afresh without any deference to the IJ's conclusion. In today's case, the primary question is where the line lies between an IJ's factual finding, reviewed for clear error, and a discretionary judgment call, reviewed by the BIA de novo. We must consider if the BIA properly applied clear-error review to truly factual findings. We also consider whether the BIA erred in refusing to remand this case to the IJ. Agreeing with some, but not all, of the petitioner's contentions, we grant only in part one of the petitions for review. BACKGROUND We begin by exploring how the parties got here, taking the facts from the administrative record, including Petitioner Adekunle Oluwabumwi Adeyanju's testimony before the IJ. See Martínez-Pérez v. Sessions, 897 F.3d 33, 37 n.1 (1st Cir. 2018). Adeyanju is a native and citizen of Nigeria who entered the United States on March 7, 2013, using a B-2 tourist visa.1 He has resided here ever since, now residing in Maine. 1A "B-2 visa" is available, for example, to "tourists and those coming for social visits, health reasons, or participation - 3 - Before his arrival from Nigeria, he submitted at least two applications for a visa, one in 2010, the other in 2011. In each, Adeyanju represented that he had a live-in domestic partner in Nigeria to whom he was engaged. Within a month of his arrival here, though, Adeyanju met, via an online dating site, Miranda Raymond, who seven months later, in the autumn of 2013, would go on to become his first U.S.-citizen wife. About six months after his marriage, Adeyanju was granted conditional resident status based on his marriage to a U.S. citizen. The couple subsequently filed a joint I-751 petition to remove the conditions of his residency.2 Before the I-751 petition was adjudicated, though, the marriage apparently deteriorated and by 2015, Adeyanju was no longer living with Raymond. Instead, he was residing with Rebecca Dyer, …
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