NOT FOR PUBLICATION FILED UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS MAR 18 2020 MOLLY C. DWYER, CLERK U.S. COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE NINTH CIRCUIT HAMZA EWEEDAH, AKA Hamza Nabil No. 19-71214 Eweedah, Agency No. A200-569-716 Petitioner, v. MEMORANDUM* WILLIAM P. BARR, Attorney General, Respondent. On Petition for Review of an Order of the Board of Immigration Appeals Argued and Submitted March 6, 2020 Pasadena, California Before: HURWITZ and FRIEDLAND, Circuit Judges, and KORMAN,** District Judge. Hamza Eweedah, a native of Saudi Arabia, petitions for review of a decision of the Board of Immigration Appeals (“BIA”) dismissing his appeal from the order of an immigration judge (“IJ”) denying Eweedah’s applications for asylum, * This disposition is not appropriate for publication and is not precedent except as provided by Ninth Circuit Rule 36-3. ** The Honorable Edward R. Korman, United States District Judge for the Eastern District of New York, sitting by designation. withholding of removal, and protection under the Convention Against Torture (“CAT”). We have jurisdiction over Eweedah’s petition for review under 8 U.S.C. § 1252, grant the petition, and remand for further proceedings. In the original appeal from the IJ’s order, the BIA held that Eweedah’s conviction under California Vehicle Code § 20001(b)(2) for hit-and-run driving constituted a particularly serious crime making him ineligible for asylum or withholding of removal under the Immigration and Nationality Act and the CAT.1 See 8 U.S.C. §§ 1158(b)(2)(A)(ii), 1231(b)(3)(B)(ii); 8 C.F.R. § 1208.16(d)(2). After Eweedah petitioned for review, we granted the parties’ joint motion to remand to allow agency consideration of our intervening opinion in Gomez-Sanchez v. Sessions, 892 F.3d 985 (9th Cir. 2018), which held that in determining whether a conviction constitutes a “particularly serious crime,” the IJ “must take all reliable, relevant information into consideration . . . including the defendant’s mental condition at the time of the crime, whether it was considered during the criminal proceedings or not,” id. at 996.2 1 In this petition for review, Eweedah challenges only the IJ’s denial of withholding of removal under the Immigration and Nationality Act and the CAT. He has not appealed the IJ’s denial of deferral of removal under the CAT. 2 Before Gomez-Sanchez, the BIA had held that “mental health is not a factor to be considered in a particularly serious crime analysis.” Matter of G-G-S-, 26 I. & N. Dec. 339, 339 (B.I.A. 2014). 2 On remand, Eweedah asked the BIA either to “remand the case back to the [IJ] to re-evaluate her decision” in light of Gomez-Sanchez, or, in the alternative, to “reverse[] the IJ’s decision and find that the hit-and-run was not a particularly serious crime.” Declining to take either suggested course, the BIA held that Eweedah’s mental health condition at the time of the hit-and-run accident did not affect its prior holding that his crime was particularly serious. Eweedah again petitioned for review, arguing that the BIA erred by not remanding for the IJ to make this determination in the first instance. We agree. In determining whether ...
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