NOT FOR PUBLICATION FILED UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS MAY 4 2023 MOLLY C. DWYER, CLERK U.S. COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE NINTH CIRCUIT BERNARD M. FEH, No. 21-343 Agency No. Petitioner, A203-710-088 v. MEMORANDUM* MERRICK B. GARLAND, Attorney General, Respondent. On Petition for Review of an Order of the Board of Immigration Appeals Argued and Submitted April 20, 2023 Phoenix, Arizona Before: TALLMAN, OWENS, and BADE, Circuit Judges. Bernard Feh, a native and citizen of Cameroon, appeals from the Board of Immigration Appeals’ (“BIA”) dismissal of his appeal from the Immigration Judge’s (“IJ”) denial of his applications for asylum, withholding of removal, and relief under the Convention Against Torture (“CAT”). As the parties are familiar with the facts, we do not recount them here. We have jurisdiction under 8 U.S.C. § 1252, and we grant the petition. * This disposition is not appropriate for publication and is not precedent except as provided by Ninth Circuit Rule 36-3. We review only the BIA’s decision except to the extent that the BIA expressly adopts the IJ’s decision or relies on its reasoning. Budiono v. Lynch, 837 F.3d 1042, 1046 (9th Cir. 2016). We review an adverse credibility finding for substantial evidence, Kumar v. Garland, 18 F.4th 1148, 1153 (9th Cir. 2021), under which findings are “conclusive unless any reasonable adjudicator would be compelled to conclude the contrary,” Flores Molina v. Garland, 37 F.4th 626, 632 (9th Cir. 2022) (citation omitted). We review de novo legal questions, including whether the agency conducted cumulative effect review. Salguero Sosa v. Garland, 55 F.4th 1213, 1219 (9th Cir. 2022). 1. The BIA found Feh not credible based on (1) an inconsistency between his testimony and a letter from his brother regarding the year of Feh’s detention by Cameroonian authorities and (2) his failure to testify about previously disclosed details regarding a separatist attack on his school. Substantial evidence does not support the adverse credibility finding. First, the BIA relied on the fact that, although Feh consistently stated he was detained in March 2018, his brother wrote a letter stating that it occurred in March 2019. This discrepancy, however, cannot support the adverse credibility finding because Feh, who was proceeding pro se at the IJ hearing, was not given a chance to offer an explanation. See Zhi v. Holder, 751 F.3d 1088, 1093 (9th Cir. 2014) (explaining that an IJ cannot base an adverse credibility determination on a contradiction without first soliciting an explanation from the petitioner). And while Feh explained to the BIA that his brother simply wrote 2 21-343 down the wrong year, the BIA never addressed this explanation. Second, any inconsistency between Feh’s statements and his brother’s letter was manifestly trivial on this record. The mere misstatement of the year of an event by Feh’s brother, who was not the one arrested, is insufficient to support the adverse credibility finding. See id. at 1090-92 (concluding that a date discrepancy of one year between the petitioner’s and his sibling’s accounts of events was “utterly …
Original document
Source: All recent Immigration Decisions In All the U.S. Courts of Appeals