Latest Case: Amaya v. Rosen (Immigration Law)

Transitional Justice and Inauguration Poems

LESLEY WEXLER

Illinois law professor Lesley M. Wexler describes how Amanda Gorman’s The Hill We Climb and Jericho Brown’s Inaugural,’ an Original Poem—as two inaugural poems—fit within the call of transitional justice. Professor Wexler explains how, read together, the two poems provide a roadmap of the transitional justice terrain the government may choose to tread.

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Amaya v. Rosen

Docket: 19-1619

Opinion Date: January 25, 2021

Judge: Quattlebaum

Areas of Law: Immigration Law

An alien may seek to avoid deportation by showing a clear probability that, if deported, he will be persecuted because of his race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a particular social group. If an alien claims he will be persecuted because of his membership in a political social group, that political social group must be "particular." The Fourth Circuit granted the petition for review in part and remanded the BIA's final order of removal, concluding that the BIA's determination that "Salvadoran MS-13 members" lacks particularity is unreasonable. In this case, the BIA's description of the particularity requirement in Matter of W-G-R-, 26 I&N Dec. 208, 221–22 (BIA 2014), impermissibly conflates it with the social distinction requirement; the BIA's flawed particularity articulation informed its rejection of the political social group in W-G-R-; and the BIA unreasonably grounded its rejection of the political social group in W-G-R- in part on the fact that it could further subdivide the group in any number of ways. Therefore, the court remanded petitioner's withholding claim for the BIA to consider the IJ's other holdings with respect to that claim. However, because the record does not compel a different understanding of the evidence, the court denied the petition for review of petitioner's claim under the Convention Against Torture.