United States Court of Appeals For the First Circuit No. 20-2169 JEAN CLEMENT MASHILINGI, Petitioner, v. MERRICK B. GARLAND,* Respondent. PETITION FOR REVIEW OF AN ORDER OF THE BOARD OF IMMIGRATION APPEALS Before Lynch, Selya, and Barron, Circuit Judges. Nicholas W. Armington, with whom Martha J. Koster, Mintz, Levin, Cohn, Ferris, Glovsky and Popeo, P.C., Elena Noureddine, and PAIR Project were on brief, for petitioner. James A. Hurley, Attorney, Office of Immigration Litigation, Civil Division, United States Department of Justice, with whom Brian M. Boynton, Acting Assistant Attorney General, and Stephen J. Flynn, Assistant Director, Office of Immigration Litigation, were on brief, for respondent. * Pursuant to Fed. R. App. P. 43(c)(2), Attorney General Merrick B. Garland has been substituted for former Attorney General William P. Barr as the respondent. November 2, 2021 SELYA, Circuit Judge. It is common ground that "a judicial officer who sees and hears a witness has a superior coign of vantage in assessing that witness's credibility." Zaruma- Guaman v. Wilkinson, 988 F.3d 1, 6 (1st Cir. 2021). Given that superior coign of vantage, courts typically afford considerable deference to a trier's credibility determinations. See, e.g., id. at 3; Rivera-Coca v. Lynch, 844 F.3d 374, 378-79 (1st Cir. 2016); Ahmed v. Holder, 765 F.3d 96, 100 (1st Cir. 2014); Mazariegos-Paiz v. Holder, 734 F.3d 57, 64 (1st Cir. 2013); Jianli Chen v. Holder, 703 F.3d 17, 21, 24 (1st Cir. 2012). This case turns on just such a credibility determination — a credibility determination made at first hand by an immigration judge (IJ) and affirmed by the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA). Given that supportable credibility determination, we conclude that the Agency's denial of asylum and other relief was supported by substantial evidence on the record considered as a whole. Accordingly, we uphold the order of removal and deny the petition for judicial review. I. BACKGROUND We briefly rehearse the relevant facts and travel of the case. In a visa application dated June 11, 2018, the petitioner, Jean Clement Mashilingi, a Rwandan national, requested permission to enter the United States and stay for a time in order (he claimed) to attend the wedding of his son. Once the visitor's visa was granted, the petitioner entered the United States in August of - 3 - 2018, with permission to stay up until the following February 7. On the final day of his authorized stay, the petitioner filed an application for protection (in the form of asylum) under the United Nations Convention Against Torture (CAT). In that asylum application, he claimed that he was kidnapped, beaten, and tortured by unknown men (whom he later learned were police officers) over several days beginning July 11, 2018. This incident, he said, was in retaliation for interviews he filmed for a local television station — interviews that concerned allegations that government officials were paying high-school girls for sex. In March of 2019, the petitioner was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) personnel. He was placed in ICE custody, and the …
Original document
Source: All recent Immigration Decisions In All the U.S. Courts of Appeals