UNPUBLISHED UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE FOURTH CIRCUIT No. 20-1821 VICENTE DE JESUS ALEMAN-MEDRANO; T.E.A.S., Petitioners, v. MERRICK B. GARLAND, Attorney General, Respondent. On Petition for Review of an Order of the Board of Immigration Appeals. Argued: September 24, 2021 Decided: November 1, 2021 Before WILKINSON, WYNN, and HARRIS, Circuit Judges. Petition for review granted by unpublished opinion. Judge Harris wrote the opinion, in which Judge Wilkinson and Judge Wynn joined. ARGUED: Abdoul Aziz Konare, KONARE LAW, Frederick, Maryland, for Petitioners. Margaret Anne O’Donnell, UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE, Washington, D.C., for Respondent. ON BRIEF: Jeffrey Bossert Clark, Acting Assistant Attorney General, Nancy Friedman, Senior Litigation Counsel, Office of Immigration Litigation, Civil Division, UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE, Washington, D.C., for Respondent. Unpublished opinions are not binding precedent in this circuit. PAMELA HARRIS, Circuit Judge: Vicente de Jesus Aleman-Medrano and his daughter T.E.A.S., citizens and natives of El Salvador, entered the United States after an MS-13 gang member raped T.E.A.S. and Aleman-Medrano filed a police report about the incident. According to Aleman-Medrano, MS-13 members threatened to kill him after he filed the report, and he now fears persecution based on his family ties if returned to El Salvador. An Immigration Judge denied Aleman-Medrano’s applications for asylum and withholding of removal on the ground that he had failed to establish the requisite “nexus” between the gang’s threats and his relationship to his daughter, and the Board of Immigration Appeals affirmed. We disagree, and for the reasons that follow, we grant the petition for review and remand for further proceedings. I. In June 2016, Aleman-Medrano and T.E.A.S. entered the United States without authorization and were soon apprehended by the Department of Homeland Security. In 2017, they conceded removability under the Immigration and Nationality Act, and each filed applications for asylum, withholding of removal, and protection under the Convention Against Torture (“CAT”). We begin by summarizing Aleman-Medrano’s account of the events that led to his flight from El Salvador, taken from testimony deemed credible by the Immigration Judge (“IJ”) and other evidence submitted in support of his application. We then turn to the legal proceedings that followed. 2 A. Early one morning in October 2015, Aleman-Medrano received a call from the police. They told him that during a raid on the home of Noe Alexander Vasquez Sigaran, an MS-13 gang member, they had discovered Sigaran having sex with Aleman- Medrano’s daughter, T.E.A.S. At the time, although the two had recently begun to live together, Sigaran was 18 years old and T.E.A.S. was only 12. The police had arrested both Sigaran and T.E.A.S., and they asked Aleman-Medrano to come to the station to pick up his daughter. When Aleman-Medrano arrived, however, the police would not release T.E.A.S. unless he first agreed to press charges against Sigaran. Feeling himself “forced” to comply, Aleman-Medrano acceded to their demand and filed a police report against Sigaran. A.R. 178. As a result, the police detained Sigaran on the charge of rape of a minor and, as …
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