In the United States Court of Appeals For the Seventh Circuit ____________________ No. 21‐2099 MATHUSALA MENGHISTAB, Petitioner, v. MERRICK GARLAND, Attorney General of the United States, Respondent. ____________________ Petition for Review of an Order of the Board of Immigration Appeals. No. A026‐649‐212 ____________________ SUBMITTED JANUARY 5, 2022 — DECIDED JUNE 21, 2022 ____________________ Before KANNE,1 WOOD, and BRENNAN, Circuit Judges. WOOD, Circuit Judge. Petitioner Mathusala Menghistab, at the time a lawful permanent resident of the United States, pleaded guilty to rape in Indiana state court in 2011. Soon thereafter, the Department of Homeland Security (the 1 Circuit Judge Kanne died on June 16, 2022, and did not participate in the decision of this case, which is being resolved under 28 U.S.C. § 46(d) by a quorum of the panel. 2 No. 21‐2099 Department) began the process of removing him to Ethiopia. Because of his rape conviction and resulting sentence, Men‐ ghistab was barred from most forms of relief, including asy‐ lum, discretionary withholding of removal, and waiver of re‐ movability. He was eligible only to apply for deferral of re‐ moval under the Convention against Torture, and he did so. An immigration judge denied him relief and the Board of Im‐ migration Appeals (the Board) affirmed. But the removal pro‐ cess was interrupted when Ethiopia refused to issue Men‐ ghistab a travel document. He was released from custody in 2013 and continued to live in the United States until, in late 2020, Ethiopia changed course and agreed to issue the travel document. That development prompted Department officials to de‐ tain Menghistab pending removal. He moved to reopen his case, citing the changed circumstances in Ethiopia since his proceedings closed, occasioned by the outbreak in November 2020 of the civil war in the Tigray region in northern Ethiopia. The Tigray War has resulted in widespread attacks on civil‐ ians. Ethnic Eritreans, such as Menghistab, have suffered par‐ ticularly severe human‐rights violations. The Board denied the motion without an evidentiary hearing, and Menghistab petitioned this court for review. We conclude that a new hear‐ ing is needed to address two key issues: the materiality of the war to Menghistab’s risk of torture; and the question whether Menghistab is an Ethiopian citizen. We therefore grant Men‐ ghistab’s petition for review and remand for further proceed‐ ings. I The events giving rise to this case date back hundreds of years, to the emergence of the numerous ethnolinguistic No. 21‐2099 3 groups that together make up modern Ethiopian society. In the interest of brevity, though, we begin the story in 1977, when Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam took power in Ethio‐ pia. Colonel Mengistu ruled Ethiopia as a Marxist dictator, imprisoning many political prisoners. One of them was Men‐ ghistab’s father, who was detained and jailed on several occa‐ sions during the late 1970s and early 1980s. The Menghistab family is of Eritrean origin, and during that period Eritrean revolutionaries were waging a war of independence against the Ethiopian government. Menghistab’s father apparently was detained because …
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