Mensah Koffi Adekpe petitions for review of a final order of the Board of Immigration Appeals requiring that he be removed to Togo. He argues that the Board, adopting the findings of the Immigration Judge, improperly disbelieved his story of political persecution at the hands of the Togolese government and failed to adequately discuss evidence corroborating his story. We grant the petition and remand the case to the Board.
Adekpe is a citizen of Togo. All agree that Togo is not a good place in which to hold political views adverse to those of the government; as Adekpe’s expert witness, anthropologist Dr. Dana Farnham, affirmed, the Togolese government “is notorious for its persecution of members of political opposition parties.” (We have already heard two appeals of purported Togolese political refugees in the past year.
See Kantoni v. Gonzales,
There is no doubt, then, that many Togolese political activists face persecution for their beliefs. What is in dispute is whether Adekpe is one of them. He entered the United States in August 2001 on a visa that expired on February 18, 2002; he applied for asylum on February 19, 2002. After an interview with a DHS Asy
At his removal hearing, Adekpe testified to a long tale structured around alternating periods of political activism and hiding from subsequent government retribution. His story begins in the city of Lome with his education at the University of Lome’s school of management in the late 1980s and early 1990s. He and others founded a student group called MELD (in French, an acronym for “Student Movement for Liberty and Democracy”), members of which met secretly to carry on discussion and write poetry and tracts about what they thought were various problems facing Togo, including discrimination against students from the south like Adekpe. (The Togolese government exploits an ethnic division between the country’s northern half, mostly of Kabye ethnicity, and its southern half, mostly Ewe. President Eyadéma and most of his supporters are Kabye; Adekpe is Ewe.)
MELD was exposed in , August 1990 while trying to recruit additional students. One of its members informed the government of its activities. The Gendarmerie, a branch of the Togolese military devoted to internal security, invaded a MELD meeting oh the University campus and arrested everyone there. They were taken to a Gendarmerie office, a sort of military camp. While the informer was quickly released, the others were held for two weeks. They all had to stay in a single small room, except for when they were taken one at a time into a different room and interrogated. The interrogators handcuffed the students, shocked them with electricity, and beat them with belts, sticks and boots. Adekpe testified that on the ninth day of his detention he was tied to a table, beaten and shocked; when he tried to fight back afterwards, he fell down from exhaustion and broke four of his front teeth. He didn’t receive professional medical attention until after the fourteenth day, when one of Adekpe’s professors brought the situation to the attention of an international human rights organization and the MELD students were released.
During roughly the same period in which he was participating in MELD, Adekpe testified, he was also developing a relationship with a Secretary General of the Mayor’s Office in Lome (a sort of assistant to the Mayor). Adekpe and the Secretary General lived in the same neighborhood, and the Secretary General’s request for help rearranging his house one day led to frequent social visits with Adekpe. Despite the Secretary General’s position in the government, which required loyalty to Eyadéma, these talks eventually turned to politics and it turned out that the Secretary General was in fact an antigo-vernment sympathizer. His friendship would later turn out to be instrumental in helping Adekpe to avoid apprehension by the military.
MELD disbanded in 1991 when President- Eyadéma permitted the creation of opposition political parties. Adekpe joined the Union of Forces of Change (UFC), a large political party that supported democratic reforms, and spent 1991 and 1992 going from town to town to help politically organize young people for demonstrations. (Adekpe’s UFC membership card is in the record.) But in 1992 the opposition’s activity overwhelmed the government’s tolerance for political dissent. The government tried to assassinate Gilchrist Olympio, the head of the UFC, and the military began to break up demonstrations, track their
Adekpe went into hiding until June of 1993, when French and German dignitaries came to meet with President Eyadéma about a possible restoration of European financial aid. The UFC mobilized for anti-government demonstrations to greet them. On the day of the visit, Adekpe participated in a march that was broken up by the military. Beaten by soldiers, Adekpe fled and stayed hidden when he learned that the government was hunting him as one of the organizers of the march.
In 1994, Adekpe’s friend, the Secretary General, informed him that he had been placed on the “black list” of government opponents. Adekpe testified that the list is “a death warrant” and that “as soon as [people on the list] are taken outside, the military can kill them easily.” (R. 194.) Adekpe also met his wife in that year and married her in 1995. He began to hide out in the house of his father-in-law, one Captain Azote. Azote was a member of President Eyadéma’s Rally of the Togolese People party (RPT) with a high-ranking position in the Togolese military, but was also, like the Secretary General, an opposition sympathizer.
Adekpe testified that his marriage to Azote’s daughter led to Azote’s death. President Eyadéma himself made a telephone call to Azote in which he inquired about the political affiliation of Azote, his wife and his daughter (though Eyadéma did not mention Adekpe). Azote responded that “in his house, all were free to do as they wanted.” (R. 196.) After this conversation, Azote began to fear that forces were organizing against him within the military. On January 29, 1996, suffering from nervous insomnia, he took a walk at about 3:00 to 4:00 in the morning. Soldiers stopped him on the street, took his identification and sidearm, let him go and then shot him in the back.
The Secretary General warned Adekpe not to remain in Lome, and he and his wife fled to Notse, a town about two hours away. There they stayed with a friend of the Secretary General until June of 1998. Adekpe’s wife gave birth to a daughter and the couple performed farm work for their host.
In June of 1997 the UFC decided to participate in upcoming European Union-financed national elections. While trying to keep a low profile, Adekpe traveled to several villages near Notse to mobilize voters. On election day, June 21, 1998, Adekpe served as a UFC representative at the Notse voting office. A “representative” fills a role something like that of an election judge in the United States, supervising voting and tabulating the votes after the polls close. As the returns began to come in, however, the government’s temporary tolerance of the opposition again came to an end. The polls closed at 6:00 p.m.; two hours later elements of Eyadé-ma’s RPT came and told the representatives to stop tabulating the votes. The non-RPT representatives continued to tabulate votes anyway, but became concerned about “suspicious movements” in the courtyard of the school that served as the polling place; so they signed a report on the vote totals and fled. Rumors quickly spread that the government was kidnaping members of the opposition again; so Adekpe’s host immediately drove him and his family south to the village of Alfao-Totche.
Adekpe hid out in Aflao-Totche. He found work as a mathematics teacher in October of 1999, but had to quit in May 2000. He learned from the Secretary General that the military suspected where he was and someone showed up at the school to ask Adekpe’s boss about him
In 2001 Adekpe received a United States visa to participate in a poetry conference (having been recognized on the basis of a poetry contest to which he had submitted poems via the internet in Ghana). Adekpe testified that on August 18, 2001, he “slipped through the border” to Ghana and traveled from there to the United States. When the DHS pointed out that there was an August 18 Ghana entry stamp in Adekpe’s passport, Adekpe clarified that he meant he had traveled across a relatively isolated border station near Aflao-Totche rather than across a more heavily-traveled border where he would be more likely to be stopped for being on the “black list.”
Since leaving Togo, Adekpe has received communications from his family, both letters (translations of which are in the record) and telephone calls occasionally placed to him by his wife from Ghana. These continue to tell the story of government harassment. Adekpe’s wife reported that in late 2001 people kept coming to her house to ask where Adekpe was, and, when she admitted that he was in the United States, the date he was expected back. On April 3, 2002, in an incident also mentioned in a letter from Adekpe’s brother, a stranger showed up at Adekpe’s daughter’s school, claiming to school officials to be a family friend and attempting to take her home. Adekpe’s family suspected he was from the military and the family fled to live with Adekpe’s mother. Adekpe’s daughter has still not returned to school out of fear of the military.
On cross-examination, the DHS drew attention to conflicts between Adekpe’s hearing testimony and accounts he had given in his application for asylum, in-his interview with an asylum officer (as evidenced by the officer’s notes) and in an affidavit. Adekpe tried to explain the omission of some details from' his application and interview, in part by claiming that he" didn’t know he was supposed to be precise about the details of his story on the application, that he thought the application was supposed to be only a summary and that the translator he brought to his asylum interview was not very skilled and plainly had difficulty with the translation.
The IJ denied Adekpe’s requests for relief. She did not believe his story, largely because of various discrepancies between Adekpe’s testimony and earlier versions of his account. She noted, for instance, that while Adekpe’s testimony made it seem that his father-in-law, Captain Azote, was killed because of his daughter’s marriage to Adekpe, Adekpe’s asylum application indicated that Azote was killed for being a dissident in his own right. The application also states that Azote was shot down on January 27 rather than on January 29 and during the course of a normal morning jog rather than in the course of an insomniac wandering. The IJ also pointed out that Adekpe had changed his story with respect to how many members MELD had, how many of them were arrested and whether or not the informant member was arrested or released.
The IJ also disbelieved Adekpe because his hearing testimony included details omitted from his previous versions of his story. Most significantly, prior to the hearing, Adekpe had failed to mention his friendship with the Secretary General of the Mayor’s Office in Lome, although Adekpe had mentioned that a “friend” helped him to get his passport. Adekpe
Finding that Adekpe’s testimony was not credible, the IJ turned to the evidence offered to corroborate it. She acknowledged that Adekpe had provided a copy of his UFC membership card and letters from his family, but nonetheless found that these did not help Adekpe because they did not “specifically corroborate” his story, that is, because they did not “corroborate the incidents that occurred specifically to him”:
The letter from the Respondent’s mother-in-law does not corroborate that her husband was killed. The letters from the Respondent’s mother and brother do not corroborate that the Respondent was detained for 14 days and beaten in 1990. The letters from his wife do not corroborate the Respondent’s involvement in the UFC or his participation in .the 1998 election as a UFC representative. As such the Respondent failed to corroborate the specific elements of his asylum claim. (App. at 56.)
Because the IJ disbelieved Adekpe’s story, she held that he was not eligible for any of the requested relief from removal. Adekpe appealed to the BIA, which affirmed without opinion, adopting the IJ’s opinion as its final determination per 8 C.F.R. § 1003.1(e)(4). Adekpe now petitions for review, challenging the denial of all three forms of relief.
We must affirm the IJ’s decision unless it is not supported by substantial evidence, 8 U.S.C. § 1252(b)(4)(B);
INS v. Elias-Zacarias,
In the present case, the IJ’s decision to discredit Adekpe’s story was not based on a reasoned analysis of the evidence as a whole. Her decision to discredit Adekpe’s testimony was based largely on unimportant discrepancies between it and earlier versions of his story regarding sub
We address the discrepancies in Adekpe’s testimony first. Inconsistencies between an alien’s hearing testimony and earlier statements, and omissions from those earlier statements, can support an adverse credibility finding. But they can do so only where they go to the heart of the asylum applicant’s claim, rather than when they concern minor and relatively immaterial points in the applicant’s testimony.
Rodriguez-Galicia,
The majority of the discrepancies the IJ relied upon to discredit Adekpe’s testimony concerned minor, immaterial parts of his testimony. Two discrepancies were arguably important — the failure to mention the Secretary General, a somewhat central character in Adekpe’s story whose friendship explains why Adekpe was able to stay ahead of the government for so long, and the contradiction concerning the reason for Captain Azote’s murder — but the vast majority were unimportant. To begin with, the central point of Adekpe’s testimony about his activities with MELD, for purposes of his claims here, is that he was detained and beaten for his political activities. The points upon which the IJ noted discrepancies — whether the meeting occurred on campus or “at home” (assuming that represents a distinction for a university student), whether the meeting had 13 or 20 participants, what precisely happened to the informant — do not concern this basic core.
Korniejew,
Second, the IJ failed to consider the obvious implications of the letters Adekpe presented from members of his family still in Togo. Even if the IJ had properly considered Adekpe’s testimony incredible on its own, other evidence, including these letters, could still bolster his story.
Uwase,
The IJ dismissed these letters because they failed to mention events from Adekpe’s narrative that occurred prior to his departure from Togo, such as his work with MELD and the UFC or the murder of Captain Azote. It is perhaps true that Adekpe’s story might be more plausible if the letters had confirmed details of these events. (On the other hand, as Adekpe observes, it might be suspicious for a letter to without solicitation recount stories that are several years old and with which the recipient is more familiar than the writer.)
But while the IJ was correct to conclude that the letters did not “specifically corroborate” Adekpe’s testimony in that way, she ignored a way in which the letters might make Adekpe’s story more plausible without specifically corroborating its details: by revealing that the situation in Togo after his departure is consistent with the situation he says existed prior to his departure.
See Balogun v. Ashcroft,
By letting her analysis of the letters from Adekpe’s family rest with a determination that they did not “specifically corroborate” his testimony, the IJ acted as though there were two distinct stories: Adekpe’s tale, covering the years 1990 to 2001 and alleging various government punishments and threats caused by Adekpe’s political opinions, and Adekpe’s family’s tale, covering the years after 2001 and alleging that the government is harassing Adekpe’s wife about his whereabouts, has tried to kidnap Adekpe’s daughter and has driven his family into hiding — all for reasons unknown. In so doing, the IJ failed to consider the evidence as it most plausibly fits together as a whole.
Cecaj v. Gonzales,
Because the IJ failed to rationally consider the evidence as a whole, we grant Adekpe’s petition for review and remand the case to the BIA. On remand, the IJ must consider the letters, evaluate their credibility and evaluate Adekpe’s story in light of the evidence as a whole, giving consideration to the possible inferences described above. The IJ must also confine its consideration of the contradictions and omissions in various versions of Adekpe’s story to those concerning facts central to his claim.