The Fourth Circuit has remanded a Honduran woman’s asylum case, finding that the agency’s “wholesale failure to fully consider . . . country-conditions evidence” was an abuse of discretion. The facts of the case were centered on stalking and other serious harm perpetrated by a man that the applicant refused to have sexual relations with. The majority opinion took aim at the dissent’s trivialization of this harm.
“Second, we do not hold—as the dissent’s parade of sister-circuit straw men might suggest—that a noncitizen may rely solely on country-conditions evidence to support a claim of persecution or torture. That is of course not the law, but it is also decidedly not what happened here. In addition to the country-conditions reports, Alfaro-Zelaya presented evidence that she was subjected to violent threats from a man who relentlessly pursued her after she had made her rejection of his advances unmistakably clear. To dismiss this as a ‘fractured personal relationship’ with a lustful man, as the dissent would have it, trivializes conduct that is, in truth, abusive and menacing. At the end of the day, our colleague in dissent may disagree on matters of degree, but the principle remains immutable: no means no. And unless every encounter between a man and a woman in Honduras culminates with the man forcing her into a car at gunpoint, stalking her at her workplace, and threatening to dismember her child should she refuse to have sex with him, the dreaded breach in the floodgates the dissent foresees will remain securely shut.”
The full text of Alfaro-Zelaya v. Bondi can be found here: