United States Court of Appeals For the Eighth Circuit ___________________________ No. 20-2140 ___________________________ Ararso Umare Mumad Petitioner v. Merrick B. Garland,1 Attorney General of the United States Respondent ____________ Petition for Review of an Order of the Board of Immigration Appeals ____________ Submitted: April 15, 2021 Filed: August 27, 2021 ____________ Before KELLY, GRASZ, and KOBES, Circuit Judges. ____________ GRASZ, Circuit Judge. Ararso Umare Mumad asks us to stop his deportation to Ethiopia—where he fears ethnically and politically-motivated violence. To do so, he asks us to declare part of the Immigration and Nationality Act unconstitutional. While Congress bars 1 Respondent Garland was automatically substituted for his predecessor under Fed. R. App. P. 43(c)(2). the Department of Homeland Security from returning Mumad to Ethiopia if the Attorney General decides that doing so would threaten Mumad’s freedom or life (8 U.S.C. § 1231(b)(3)(A)), that bar disappears if the Attorney General determines that Mumad has a “particularly serious crime” (“PSC”) conviction. To Mumad, that undefined statutory term is void for vagueness because it gives the executive and judicial branches free rein to label any conviction a PSC. Alternatively, he challenges the Board of Immigration Appeals’s decision to deny treaty-based relief. We deny Mumad’s petition for review. I. Background As a child in the Ethiopian state of Oromia, Mumad experienced violence, torture, and loss in the conflict between the Oromos and the Tigrayans, a rival ethnic group. 2 There, Mumad’s father helped arm the Oromo Liberation Front. In turn, Tigrayan soldiers took Mumad’s father into custody to question him about his dissident activities. Mumad never heard from him again. A few years later, Tigrayan soldiers killed his mother. And, when Tigrayan soldiers set his house ablaze, one brother died inside, while Mumad and his other brother jumped from a second-story window. Tigrayan soldiers later killed that brother. Meanwhile, Mumad spent weeks in a coma. Soon after, the United States welcomed the fourteen-year-old orphan as a refugee in Minnesota. Since then, he experienced homelessness and received mental-health diagnoses, including for post-traumatic-stress disorder. He also encountered legal trouble, receiving a juvenile-delinquency adjudication for sexually assaulting another minor, which triggered predatory-offender-registration duties. 2 Because the Immigration Judge found Mumad’s factual recitations credible and the Board affirmed, we work from those facts. -2- A few years later, a state court sentenced Mumad to serve a year-and-a-day for failing to register as a predatory offender. See Minn. Stat. § 243.166, subd. 5(a). Citing that conviction, DHS asked the Immigration Judge to rule that she could remove (i.e., deport) Mumad to Ethiopia. Fearing that his ethnicity and his political views would mark him for death in Ethiopia, Mumad applied for asylum. Although the IJ denied that relief, she allowed Mumad to stay in the United States by granting withholding of removal under 8 U.S.C. § 1231(b)(3)(A). Seven years later, DHS wanted to end that withholding, citing intervening state criminal convictions and corresponding prison sentences: (1) 18 months for felony theft from a person; (2) 15 months for failing to register …
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