Okeke Egungwu v. Merrick Garland ( 2021 )

NOT FOR PUBLICATION FILED
UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS MAR 22 2021
MOLLY C. DWYER, CLERK
U.S. COURT OF APPEALS
FOR THE NINTH CIRCUIT
OKEKE KINGSLEY EGUNGWU, No. 18-73475
Petitioner, Agency No. A077-353-799
v.
MEMORANDUM*
MERRICK B. GARLAND, Attorney
General,
Respondent.
On Petition for Review of an Order of the
Board of Immigration Appeals
Argued and Submitted March 1, 2021
San Francisco, California
Before: WARDLAW and BERZON, Circuit Judges, and CHEN,** District Judge.
Okeke Kingsley Egungwu (Kingsley), a purported native and citizen of
Sierra Leone, petitions for review of the Board of Immigration Appeals’s (BIA)
decision affirming the Immigration Judge’s (IJ) order denying him asylum,
withholding of removal, and deferral of removal under the Convention Against
*
This disposition is not appropriate for publication and is not precedent
except as provided by Ninth Circuit Rule 36-3.
**
The Honorable Edward M. Chen, United States District Judge for the
Northern District of California, sitting by designation.
Torture. We have jurisdiction under 8 U.S.C. § 1252. We deny the petition.1
1. Substantial evidence supported the BIA’s denial of Kingsley’s
application for asylum and withholding of removal based on his failure to
demonstrate a well-founded fear of persecution in Sierra Leone.
The evidence supported the BIA’s finding that “DHS established by a
preponderance of the evidence” that there has been a fundamental change in the
country conditions in Sierra Leone that bore on whether Kingsley has a well-
founded fear of future persecution. According to the record, the Sierra Leone civil
war ended in 2002. Members of both the Civil Defense Force (CDF) and
Revolutionary United Front (RUF)—the two militias that Kingsley claimed had
persecuted him during that civil war—were tried for war crimes, and the RUF
militia disbanded entirely. Sierra Leone now enjoys “peaceful multiparty
elections,” its “constitution and law provide citizens the ability to change their
government through free and fair periodic elections based on universal and equal
suffrage,” and “citizens exercised that ability.” Moreover, in both 2015 and 2016,
“there were no reports of politically motivated disappearances,” nor were there
“reports of political prisoners or detainees.” The agency appropriately noted these
1
We assume without deciding that Kingsley testified credibly and that
the Immigration and Nationality Act’s terrorism bar, see 8 U.S.C. § 1182(a)(3)(B),
did not render him inadmissible to the United States. We thus address only the
agency’s conclusions regarding changed country conditions in Sierra Leone and
their impact on Kingsley’s claims for relief.
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changes in Sierra Leone as it tailored its analysis of changed country conditions to
Kingsley’s “claims of past persecution[,] . . . based on the actions by one of the
parties to the civil war in the 1990s.”
The agency reasonably concluded that Kingsley lacked a well-founded fear
of future persecution in Sierra Leone. The changed circumstances in Sierra Leone
rebutted any presumption of future persecution premised on past persecution. See
Sowe v. Mukasey, 538 F.3d 1281, 1286 (9th Cir. 2008) (finding rebutted, for
similar reasons, any presumption of future persecution by the RUF). And absent
such a presumption, the agency reasonably determined that Kingsley’s remaining
concerns about living in Sierra Leone amounted to a “general, undifferentiated”
fear of violence, which is insufficient to establish a well-founded fear of
persecution. Lolong v. Gonzales, 484 F.3d 1173, 1179 (9th Cir. 2007).
2. Substantial evidence supported the agency’s denial of Kingsley’s
application for CAT relief, based, again, on the evidence of changed country
conditions. See Sowe, 539 F.3d at 1288 (“[J]ust as changed country conditions can
defeat an asylum claim, they can also defeat a claim for CAT protection.”); cf.
Konou v. Holder, 750 F.3d 1120, 1125 (9th Cir. 2014) (noting that “a State
Department Report alone can . . . serve to outweigh an applicant’s evidence of a
probability of torture,” including credible evidence of his past torture so long as the
IJ provides an “individualized analysis”).
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PETITION DENIED.
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