The Board of Immigration Appeals has sustained DHS's appeal from a grant of humanitarian asylum to a Brazilian man who was physically abused as a child and drugged and raped by two men, vacating the grant and remanding for consideration of his separate CAT claim.
The Board held that "Brazilian children" and "abandoned Brazilian children" are not cognizable particular social groups because they lack the required particularity, encompassing an enormous and diffuse swath of society with no defined boundaries around the term "abandoned." The Board also found clear error in the immigration judge's conclusion that the Brazilian government was unable or unwilling to control the respondent's abusers, noting that one perpetrator had been arrested in connection with other crimes and that Brazil provides services and a hotline to protect abused children, and held that without a showing of past persecution the respondent could not qualify for humanitarian asylum.
The full text of Matter of A-G-O-F- can be found here: https://www.justice.gov/eoir/media/1453426/dl?inline