The Board of Immigration Appeals has sustained DHS's appeal from a grant of asylum to an Indian political-opinion applicant, holding that the immigration judge clearly erred by discounting twelve redacted declarations from unrelated asylum cases that DHS submitted to show suspicious, boilerplate-style similarities to the respondent's own declaration.
The Board held that redacting personally identifying information from inter-proceeding declarations sufficiently protects the other applicants' privacy under the asylum confidentiality regulation and clarified that the procedural safeguards for inter-proceeding comparisons do not require the other declarants to be made available for cross-examination, since the declarations are offered only to show textual similarities, not for the truth of their contents. The Board also held that the harm the respondent described, two assaults requiring only minor treatment, did not rise to the level of persecution as a matter of law, and remanded for the judge to reassess credibility using the correct word-and-phrase comparison framework and to address withholding and CAT relief in the first instance.
The full text of Matter of V-S-A- can be found here: https://www.justice.gov/eoir/media/1460841/dl?inline