NOT FOR PUBLICATION FILED UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS AUG 19 2022 MOLLY C. DWYER, CLERK U.S. COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE NINTH CIRCUIT LUIS ENRIQUE CHOPIN-RAMOS, AKA No. 20-70576 Luis Chopin, AKA Luis Enrique Chopinramos, Agency No. A204-447-702 Petitioner, MEMORANDUM* v. MERRICK B. GARLAND, Attorney General, Respondent. On Petition for Review of an Order of the Board of Immigration Appeals Argued and Submitted August 5, 2021 Pasadena, California Before: PAEZ, CALLAHAN, and HURWITZ, Circuit Judges. Dissent by Judge PAEZ Luis Enrique Chopin-Ramos, a native and citizen of Mexico, obtained Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (“DACA”) status, which was terminated after a California conviction for driving under the influence and causing bodily injury. An immigration judge (“IJ”) then denied Chopin-Ramos’s applications for * This disposition is not appropriate for publication and is not precedent except as provided by Ninth Circuit Rule 36-3. asylum and withholding of removal but granted deferral of removal under the Convention Against Torture (“CAT”). The Board of Immigration Appeals (“BIA”) reversed, finding the IJ’s prediction that Chopin-Ramos would more likely than not be tortured with government acquiescence if returned to Mexico clearly erroneous. We deny Chopin-Ramos’s petition for review of the BIA’s CAT ruling. 1. Because an IJ’s prediction that a petitioner will more likely than not be tortured by a foreign government or with that government’s acquiescence if removed is a factual finding, the BIA must review it for clear error. See Ridore v. Holder, 696 F.3d 907, 915–16 (9th Cir. 2012). “[T]he BIA may find an IJ’s factual finding to be clearly erroneous only if it is illogical or implausible, or without support in inferences that may be drawn from the facts in the record.” Guerra v. Barr, 974 F.3d 909, 912 (9th Cir. 2020) (cleaned up). The BIA found that the IJ clearly erred to the extent she implicitly found that a cousin who raped Chopin-Ramos two decades ago, when petitioner was six years old, was likely to harm him upon his return to Mexico. The BIA expressly noted the facts in the record that rendered such a predictive inference implausible, including that Chopin-Ramos was a child at the time of the rape, lived unharmed in Mexico for 6 years after the incident, has had no contact with the rapist since the incident, and does not know where the rapist is. The BIA did not engage in impermissible factfinding, but rather found that the predicate facts found by the IJ did not support 2 a reasonable inference that the cousin would torture Chopin-Ramos in the future with the acquiescence of the Mexican government. 2. Chopin-Ramos also claimed that he was more likely than not to be tortured if removed on account of his status as gay male in a same-sex marriage. But in challenging the BIA decision that the IJ’s prediction of future torture was not supported by the record, Chopin-Ramos “does not point to any fact found by the IJ that was ignored by the BIA, or any fact found by the …
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