The Board of Immigration Appeals has sustained DHS's appeal from a grant of asylum to a Venezuelan woman whose claim rested on her political opposition to former President Nicolás Maduro's government, holding that Maduro's January 2026 removal from power and the transfer of executive authority to an Interim Government constitute a change in country conditions that the immigration judge failed to adequately assess against the respondent's individual circumstances.
The Board held that a change in national leadership does not automatically eliminate a well-founded fear of persecution, since officials or security forces tied to a former regime may still pose a danger to a particular applicant, but that the immigration judge's conclusory statements that "the essence of the Maduro government remains" lacked the factual findings needed to support that conclusion here. The Board took administrative notice of the reopening of the U.S. embassy in Caracas and ongoing U.S.-brokered discussions toward a democratic transition and remanded for the judge to determine whether the individuals and institutions the respondent fears remain willing and able to target her under the new political circumstances. The Board also flagged that the judge never resolved whether the respondent's asylum application, filed under her own name only in March 2026 despite having been a derivative beneficiary on her husband's 2015 filing, satisfied the one-year filing deadline or an exception to it, and remanded for that threshold question to be addressed first.
The full text of Matter of A-E-V-M- can be found here: https://www.justice.gov/eoir/media/1460306/dl?inline