United States Court of Appeals For the First Circuit No. 17-1867 MIRIAM IXCUNA-GARCIA, Petitioner, v. MERRICK B. GARLAND,* Attorney General, Respondent. PETITION FOR REVIEW OF AN ORDER OF THE BOARD OF IMMIGRATION APPEALS Before Thompson and Kayatta, Circuit Judges, and Katzmann,** Judge. Nancy J. Kelly, with whom John Willshire Carrera, Harvey Kaplan, and Harvard Immigration & Refugee Clinic were on brief, for petitioner. M. Jocelyn Lopez Wright, Senior Litigation Counsel, Office of Immigration Litigation, Civil Division, with whom Chad A. Readler, Acting Assistant Attorney General, Civil Division, and Melissa Neiman-Kelting, Assistant Director, Office of Immigration Litigation, were on brief, for respondent. Mark C. Fleming, Arjun K. Jaikumar, Cristina Salcedo, and Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr LLP on brief for Harvard * Pursuant to Fed. R. App. P. 43(c)(2), Attorney General Merrick B. Garland has been substituted for former Attorney General Jefferson B. Sessions, III. ** Of the United States Court of International Trade, sitting by designation. Program in Refugee Trauma and Dr. F. Barton Evans III, amici curiae. February 8, 2022 KAYATTA, Circuit Judge. Miriam Ixcuna-Garcia is a Guatemala-born indigenous K'iche' woman who came to the United States when she was sixteen. After being detained in a workplace raid in 2007, Ixcuna-Garcia applied for relief that included asylum and withholding of removal. Her case wound its way back and forth between an immigration judge (IJ) and the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) before arriving at this court on the present petition. As relevant here, the IJ and the BIA found that Ixcuna- Garcia was ineligible for asylum because she exceeded the one-year deadline for applying for such relief, and they denied her application for withholding of removal. They also questioned Ixcuna-Garcia's credibility, in part due to her failure to provide evidence from her mother corroborating her claim that she had been sexually assaulted as a child. Before this court, the government concedes that Ixcuna- Garcia's application for withholding of removal should be remanded due to the failure of the IJ and the BIA to consider pertinent aspects of Ixcuna-Garcia's claims of past persecution. And we agree with Ixcuna-Garcia that the IJ and the BIA also erred in failing to provide her with, at the very least, an opportunity to explain why she could not provide certain corroborating evidence in connection with her request for withholding. Accordingly, we vacate the denial of Ixcuna-Garcia's application for withholding from removal. As to her request for asylum, however, we agree - 3 - with the government that we lack jurisdiction to review the denial of that application. Our reasoning follows. I. We begin with the circumstances that prompted this petition. Ixcuna-Garcia was born in Guatemala to an indigenous K'iche' Mayan family. She came to the United States in 2002 at the age of sixteen and settled into a K'iche' community in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Ixcuna-Garcia did not apply for asylum when she first arrived in the United States. On March 6, 2007, Ixcuna-Garcia was detained during a raid on the Michael Bianco factory …
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