Supreme Court Rules Appeals Courts Must Defer to Immigration Judges’ Decisions

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously on March 4 that federal appeals courts must give more weight to immigration judges’ decisions on what qualifies as persecution in adjudicating whether immigrants are entitled to asylum.

When an immigrant applies for asylum, a judge has to first determine the facts of the case, then decide if the threat of persecution in the applicant’s home country is credible. The Immigration and Nationality Act states that judges’ factual determinations in those cases are usually “conclusive.”

In an opinion for the Supreme Court, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote that when the decisions about persecution are based on “substantial evidence,” they must be allowed to stand.

Quoting a previous case, she wrote that an immigration judge’s decision about persecution cannot be overturned unless the evidence was “so compelling that no reasonable factfinder could fail to find the requisite fear of persecution.”

In 2022, an immigration judge found that, though El Salvador native Douglas Humberto Urias-Orellana had faced death threats in his native country, that danger did not qualify as persecution. A Board of Immigration Appeals agreed.

The Court of Appeals for the First Circuit in November 2024 declined to overturn that decision, finding that the proper legal standard required appeals courts to accept the immigration judge’s findings “as long as they are supported by reasonable, substantial and probative evidence.”

Urias-Orellana then appealed to the Supreme Court, arguing that the First Circuit should have conducted a fresh review of whether he faced persecution, instead of deferring to the lower court rulings.

Beginning in 2016, Urias-Orellana faced death threats from a hitman who shot two of his half-brothers and had vowed to kill every member of his family.

He fled the city of Sonsonate, El Salvador, but was repeatedly tracked down by men who demanded money and threatened to harm him if he didn’t pay. He was also assaulted by one of those men when he briefly returned home.

To escape, he entered the United States illegally with his wife and child in June 2021. A few months later, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) gave them notice that they would be deported and required them to appear before an immigration judge. The family requested asylum.

The immigration judge found Urias-Orellana’s testimony credible but said the evidence didn’t show he faced persecution as defined under the Immigration and Nationality Act. The law says the asylum-seeker has to prove he or she faced “persecution, or a well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.”

The judge said the Salvadoran was able to live in relative safety when he fled, and only faced risk when he returned to Sonsonate. Urias-Orellana had also produced no psychological or medical evaluation to show he had “long-lasting physical or mental effects from that mistreatment.”

In a petition to the Supreme Court, Urias-Orellana’s attorneys argued that the First Circuit should have made its own decision about whether his situation qualified as persecution.

His attorneys argued that the law does not prohibit federal courts from reviewing those decisions.

One provision of federal immigration law states that an immigration judge’s “findings of fact are conclusive unless any reasonable adjudicator would be compelled to conclude to the contrary.”

That’s called “substantial evidence” review, Jackson said, and it only requires “such relevant evidence as a reasonable mind might accept as adequate to support a conclusion.”

Jackson agreed that courts had not always been consistent on this point: Sometimes courts used the “substantial evidence” standard to address both the factual and legal aspects of the case; other times they only applied that standard when reviewing the facts, and not the legal conclusions the lower courts had reached on the persecution question.

“Today we resolve the proper-standard question as it relates to the courts of appeals’ review of the agency’s persecution determination,” she wrote.