United States Court of Appeals For the First Circuit No. 20-1533 LUIS ALFREDO ZARUMA-GUAMAN, Petitioner, v. ROBERT M. WILKINSON,* Acting United States Attorney General, Respondent. PETITION FOR REVIEW OF AN ORDER OF THE BOARD OF IMMIGRATION APPEALS Before Howard, Chief Judge, Selya and Kayatta, Circuit Judges. Kevin P. MacMurray and MacMurray & Associates on brief for petitioner. Matthew B. George, Senior Litigation Counsel, Office of Immigration Litigation, Jeffrey Bossert Clark, Acting Assistant Attorney General, Civil Division, U.S. Dep't of Justice, and Anthony P. Nicastro, Assistant Director, Office of Immigration Litigation, on brief for respondent. * Pursuant to Fed. R. App. P. 43(c)(2), Acting Attorney General Robert M. Wilkinson has been substituted for former Attorney General William P. Barr as the respondent. February 9, 2021 SELYA, Circuit Judge. The petitioner, Luis Alfredo Zaruma-Guaman, entreats us to set aside a decision of the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA), which affirmed the denial of his application for asylum, withholding of removal, and other relief. The BIA decision rested largely on a credibility determination made by the immigration judge (IJ). Mindful that such determinations, when made by a judicial officer who has the benefit of seeing and hearing the witness testify at first hand, deserve a considerable measure of deference, we deny the petition for judicial review. I. BACKGROUND We start by briefly rehearsing the relevant facts and travel of the case. The petitioner is an Ecuadorian national who entered the United States without a valid entry document on November 4, 2014. He did not get very far: he was apprehended near the southern border later that day. At the time, the petitioner was twenty years old. The petitioner was interviewed by a border patrol agent the following day. When the interview commenced, the petitioner swore that his responses would be truthful. Asked whether he was in fear of persecution or torture in Ecuador, the petitioner responded in the negative. The interview was recorded in an official report, which the petitioner subsequently refused to sign. This report was titled "Record of Sworn Statement in - 3 - Proceedings under Section 235(b)(1) of the Act," and we will refer to it as the "sworn statement report." The petitioner was detained, and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issued an expedited removal order. Later — the record is tenebrous as to the precise date — the petitioner expressed a fear of persecution should he be repatriated, and DHS held a credible fear interview on November 25, 2014. During the credible fear interview, the petitioner claimed that he had been mistreated on approximately ten occasions while in Ecuador by people in his neighborhood and at work. He described being punched, kicked, and insulted due to his indigenous ethnicity (Quechuan) and a podiatric condition. He also claimed that he feared future harm on account of his political affiliation with the Pachacuti party. The petitioner explained that he was unable to report the abuse to the police because he would have been mistreated (although he never said by whom). ...
Original document
Source: All recent Immigration Decisions In All the U.S. Courts of Appeals