Stella Moudoyan v. William Barr


FILED NOT FOR PUBLICATION NOV 25 2019 UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS MOLLY C. DWYER, CLERK U.S. COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE NINTH CIRCUIT STELLA MOUDOYAN, AKA Stella No. 17-70020 Bovo, MELINA BOVO, and MARTINO BOVO, Agency Nos. A099-061-381, A099-061-382, A099-061-383 Petitioners, v. MEMORANDUM* WILLIAM P. BARR, Attorney General, Respondent. On Petition for Review of an Order of the Board of Immigration Appeals Argued and Submitted November 6, 2019 Pasadena, California Before: FARRIS, McKEOWN, and PARKER, Jr.,** Circuit Judges. Stella Moudoyan, on behalf of herself and her two children, Melina and Martino Bovo, seeks review of the Board of Immigration Appeals’ (“BIA”) * This disposition is not appropriate for publication and is not precedent except as provided by Ninth Circuit Rule 36-3. ** The Honorable Barrington D. Parker, Jr., United States Circuit Judge for the Second Circuit, sitting by designation. dismissal of her appeal from an Immigration Judge’s final order of removal. We review the BIA’s factual findings for substantial evidence, Duran-Rodriguez v. Barr, 918 F.3d 1025, 1028 (9th Cir. 2019), and deny the petition for review. The BIA found that an Italian mafia syndicate’s four separate threats to Moudoyan and her children were neither explicit, overt, nor implied, and were combined with no other instances of harm or violence that would cause them to amount to past persecution—even when considered cumulatively. It found that Moudoyan’s fear of future persecution was too speculative and not objectively reasonable, in part because she provided no evidence that her husband had in fact cooperated with Italian authorities against the mafia. The BIA noted that the Italian government had been making progress in disrupting organized crime, and that Moudoyan had not shown relocation within Italy to be unreasonable. The record evidence does not compel a contrary conclusion as to past persecution. See id.; Pedro-Mateo v. INS, 224 F.3d 1147, 1150 (9th Cir. 2000). “In certain extreme cases,” this Court has held that “repeated and especially menacing death threats can constitute a primary part of a past persecution claim, particularly where those threats are combined with confrontation or other mistreatment.” Lim v. INS, 224 F.3d 929, 936 (9th Cir. 2000) (citing Reyes-Guerrero v. INS, 192 F.3d 1241, 1243–46 (9th Cir. 1999); Del Carmen Molina v. INS, 170 F.3d 1247, 1249 2 (9th Cir. 1999)). But without accompanying physical harms, threats “constitute past persecution in only a small category of cases, and only when the threats are so menacing as to cause significant actual ‘suffering or harm.’” Id. (citing Sangha v. INS, 103 F.3d 1482, 1487 (9th Cir. 1997)). Moudoyan describes feelings of fear, including shaking, trembling, and being “afraid of [her] own shadow” in the wake of the threats, but she does not describe “significant actual suffering or harm.” We do not dismiss Moudoyan’s feelings—we acknowledge that a threat from members of an organized crime family is a serious form of intimidation. But a petitioner’s description of threats alone and her subjective fear associated with them is generally insufficient to carry her burden to establish ...

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