Singh v. Blanche: The Judge Believed Him. Asylum Still Failed.

The immigration judge believes you. The threat happened. The beatings happened. The night in the police station happened. Then the decision arrives, and it says none of that was persecution, and that you can live safely somewhere else in your own country anyway.

Baljit Singh received that decision. He is a practicing Sikh from Punjab, India, and a member of a political group known as the Mann party. He asked the Ninth Circuit, the federal appeals court that covers California, to overturn it. The judges called his beatings “reprehensible.” They denied his petition anyway.

The case is Singh v. Blanche, No. 24-815 (9th Cir. May 15, 2026), a published amended opinion. It teaches three things. Being believed and being persecuted are separate questions. A federal appeals court now overturns the agency’s answer on persecution only if the record forces the opposite conclusion. And losing on past harm can put on you the burden of showing that relocating would not be reasonable.

A threat, two beatings and a night in custody

Singh’s account covers eleven months. He told the immigration court that the danger came from two rival political groups, the Akali Dal Badal party and the Bharatiya Janata party, or BJP.

In April 2014, several masked men confronted him after a Mann party event. Leave the party, they warned, “otherwise the consequences [would] be bad.”

In June 2014, after he put up political posters, several men approached him and threatened him for staying in the party. They beat him with wooden sticks for one to two minutes and knocked him unconscious. He spent three days in a local hospital, where he received a hot compress, an injection and oral medication for swelling and some “accumulated” blood. He went to the police. They “refused to take the report” and told him they would “lock [him] up” if he came back to file another complaint.

Singh stopped working for the party for six months and took his wife and children to his in-laws’ home, just over 20 miles away. An unidentified person came to his father’s home “one or two times” asking where he was. Singh had no problems at his in-laws’.

Then he went home. In February 2015, six people threatened him for not leaving the party and beat him with wooden sticks for about two minutes. A doctor treated swelling on his forehead and unspecified injuries to his shoulders and knees with a hot compress and IV pain medication. He went back to the same police station. This time officers held him overnight and told him to leave the Mann party. They did not physically harm him.

The judge believed him and still denied asylum

The immigration judge found that Singh testified credibly. The judge also concluded that the three incidents did not rise to the level of past persecution and that Singh had not shown he could not relocate within India. The judge denied his applications and ordered him removed to India.

Those are different questions. Credibility asks whether a person’s account is true. Persecution asks whether that true account is serious enough. To prove past persecution, an applicant must show three things: treatment that rises to the level of persecution, a protected reason for it such as religion or political opinion, and a persecutor that is the government or a force the government cannot or will not control. On past harm, Singh’s case turned on the first. Persecution, the court repeated, is “an extreme concept that means something considerably more than discrimination or harassment.”

The Board of Immigration Appeals agreed with the judge. Singh’s “past harm—threats and two very brief beatings by a group of BJP members requiring some medical treatment, and a single night’s detention—does not rise to the level of persecution,” it wrote.

The court could ask only whether the record forced a different answer

Singh asked the court to overturn the agency. The law gives a reviewing court little room to do that. Under 8 U.S.C. § 1252(b)(4)(B), the agency’s findings are “conclusive unless any reasonable adjudicator would be compelled to conclude to the contrary.”

Some Ninth Circuit decisions had decided for themselves whether undisputed facts amounted to persecution. In March 2026, the Supreme Court settled the question in Urias-Orellana v. Bondi, 607 U.S. 537 (2026). The deferential standard, the Court held, covers “the entirety of the agency’s conclusions,” both the facts and the application of the immigration statute to those facts. Our Urias-Orellana analysis explains that decision. The Singh panel said the Court had abrogated this circuit’s contrary holdings.

The panel first decided Singh’s case on December 1, 2025. Its amended opinion, issued May 15, 2026, applies Urias-Orellana. Judge Sandra Ikuta sat on the original panel and died before the amendment, so Judges Ryan Nelson and Lawrence VanDyke issued the new opinion as a quorum. The amendment also changed the relocation reasoning, as explained below.

The standard decided the case, and the panel was candid about it. Singh’s harm might have persuaded someone else. “[E]ven if we might consider Singh’s cumulative harms sufficient to constitute persecution on de novo review,” the panel wrote, it was “not permitted to substitute” its view for the Board’s. Another immigration judge might rule the other way on similar facts. That would not make this decision unsupported. “Although a reasonable factfinder could have found th[ese] incident[s] sufficient to establish past persecution,” the panel said, quoting an earlier case, “we do not believe that a factfinder would be compelled to do so.”

One at a time, no incident forced a finding of persecution

The yardstick came from Sharma v. Garland, 9 F.4th 1052 (9th Cir. 2021), which lists what tends to matter: significant physical violence and serious injury, whether the harm was isolated or part of a pattern, the length and quality of any detention, threats, harm to family, economic harm and political turmoil. Those things are weighed together, Sharma said, to see whether they form “a sufficiently negative portrait” of the applicant’s experience “that not only allows a finding of past persecution but requires it.”

The panel took each event in turn. The April warning came first. It was not, the panel said, a “specific” or “menacing” statement that placed him in imminent fear of harm. And “[m]ere threats, without more, do not necessarily compel a finding of past persecution.”

The beatings were harder. The panel said it was “concerned that Singh was knocked unconscious in the first assault.” But it pointed to what he did not report: “concussions, skull fractures, lacerations, or traumatic brain injuries.” He reported swelling and no visible injuries. “Beatings without serious injuries do not compel a finding of past persecution,” the panel wrote. It set his case beside two where persecution was “clear.” In one, guerrillas who had repeatedly invaded a man’s home and murdered family members and neighbors kidnapped him, tied him up and beat him unconscious. In the other, soldiers assaulted a man in front of his family, held him in a cell and beat him for a week, then later beat him on the street until he was bleeding and unconscious, leaving him nine days in the hospital.

Three days in a hospital did not close the gap. That stay was “concerning,” the panel said, but a hot compress, an injection and oral medication treated his injuries. Quoting an older case, it said the point “is not whether [Singh] went to a hospital, but whether his injuries were severe enough to merit treatment.”

The night in custody came last. In some circumstances, detention combined with physical attacks can establish persecution, but the “length and quality” of the detention are what count. Singh was held one night and was not physically harmed. In earlier cases, five or six days in custody without a beating, and three days with blows from a rod that left red marks, had not compelled a finding of persecution.

Added together, the incidents still did not connect

Harm that falls short piece by piece can still be persecution when counted together. The question is “the cumulative effect of all the incidents.” Here the answer depended on whether the incidents had anything to do with each other.

The panel called the connection “tenuous.” The April threat and the June beating may have been related. But it thought it unlikely that the four people it counted in the June attack were among the six from February, because Singh recognized none of the February attackers even though they were unmasked and feet away and the June attackers had been unmasked too. No evidence showed that the two groups came from the same political party. And no evidence compelled the conclusion that they wore uniforms or had ties to the military or police, which made it harder still to tie his night in custody to the beatings.

So the assaults looked more like “isolated” and “sporadic incidents” of crime. “One vague threat by unknown people, two apparently unrelated assaults by unknown people, and a brief detention by police over an eleven-month period do not compel us to reverse the BIA,” the panel concluded.

It measured that against earlier cases in which the agency’s denial had stood. One applicant had been detained by police for three days and beaten with a rod. Another had been taken from his car, held for several hours at a police station, and hit and kicked. A third had been blacklisted by the government, lost her job and suffered a nighttime home invasion in which paramilitary members punched her and threatened to kill her and her young daughter.

That passage matters as much to an applicant as the medical records do. Who attacked you, whether you recognized them, what they said and why you believe the incidents belong together all need to be in the hearing record. As the next sections show, the same facts also decide who carries the burden on relocation.

Earlier wins by Mann party members did not bind the agency

Singh pointed to earlier Ninth Circuit cases that Mann party members from Punjab had won. He relied mostly on A. Singh v. Garland, 97 F.4th 597 (9th Cir. 2024), which measured its facts against five factors taken from an earlier Mann party case: being forced to flee home after repeated assaults, a death threat, attacks when the applicant was 16 to 18, violence against a brother too, and the court’s recognition that Mann party members face persistent threats in that part of India. The Board had not analyzed those factors.

That was not reversible error, for two reasons. First, the factors are not a “special rule” for all Mann party Sikhs from Punjab. Asylum review “is not subject to a set formula,” and A. Singh used the factors as “a tool—not as a binding test” in a case with “strikingly similar” circumstances. The panel set this beside Supreme Court decisions rejecting Ninth Circuit special rules in immigration cases, including Garland v. Ming Dai, 593 U.S. 357 (2021), which struck down the circuit’s rule that a court must take an asylum applicant’s testimony as true, and INS v. Elias-Zacarias, 502 U.S. 478 (1992).

Second, Singh’s facts differed. He lived with his in-laws after only one assault. He received no death threats. He was not a minor when the attacks occurred. He did not allege that BJP members harmed his family. Comparing cases cuts both ways, the panel added: “[W]e decline to pull out similar facts in cases when we reversed the BIA and ignore similar facts in cases when we upheld the BIA’s conclusion.”

Losing on past harm put the relocation burden on him

The past-persecution ruling carried a second cost. A person who proves past persecution is presumed to have a well-founded fear of future persecution. The government can then defeat the presumption by showing that the person can avoid persecution by relocating and that it would be reasonable to expect that. Even if Singh had earned the presumption, the panel added, the government “still could successfully rebut” it that way. Singh had not established past persecution, or that his persecutors were the government or “government-sponsored.” He got no presumption. So he carried the burden of showing that relocating would not be reasonable. In our reading, the panel’s conclusion about the unknown attackers did double work here. Nothing compelled a link between them and the military or police, and the absence of a government connection helped keep the burden on Singh.

He could not carry it. The agency pointed to evidence suggesting “at least one area within India” where he had no well-founded fear and could reasonably move. It relied on a 2018 report from the Law Library of Congress, which said “[t]here appear to be no legal obstacles for members of the Sikh faith to relocate to other areas of India” and that “[o]nly hard-core militants appear to be of interest to central Indian authorities.” Simply holding Mann party views, the report said, “would not make someone a high-profile militant.” The Board added that no evidence showed low-level Mann party members are singled out and that the BJP was unlikely to have the means to track him across India. A reasonable adjudicator could accept that, the panel held, and nothing compelled the opposite.

The reasoning on this point changed between the two opinions. The panel’s original opinion leaned on Singh’s six months with his in-laws, saying “there is a specific area within India, only 35 to 40 kilometers away,” and treating his “successful relocation” as one of three supports for the finding. The amended opinion no longer relies on that stay as a safe place. It rests the finding on the country evidence and the other factors the Board listed, and it adds a sentence placing the burden on Singh. Anyone quoting the December 2025 opinion for the in-laws point is quoting reasoning the panel later removed.

Judge VanDyke, in a separate concurrence, pointed to the burden to distinguish earlier wins. In A. Singh and Singh v. Whitaker, 914 F.3d 654 (9th Cir. 2019), he wrote, the court granted petitions after finding similar Law Library reports insufficient to show that relocation would be reasonable. The government carried the burden in those cases, he explained in a footnote, and Singh carried it here. Those earlier cases also turned on something a relocation record can miss. In A. Singh and Whitaker, the applicant said he would keep working for his party wherever he went, and the Board’s failure to address that made its relocation analysis inadequate. Whitaker also held that the government may propose “a specific or a more general area” for relocation, so a proposal as broad as “outside Punjab” can be enough to start the inquiry. Our Ortiz-Herrera analysis shows that opposite posture, where past persecution was established. If relocation is the issue in your case, our guide to relocation evidence explains how to test a proposed place. If new attacks arrive after a relocation finding, our Gurbhian Singh analysis covers that different problem.

Nothing went back to the agency

Asylum and withholding of removal failed on the same two findings. The court never reached protection under the Convention Against Torture. The Board said Singh had not meaningfully challenged the immigration judge’s findings, and he forfeited the issue in the Ninth Circuit by leaving it out of his brief.

The court’s last word was “DENIED.” There was no remand and no new hearing to prepare for. The agency’s decision stands.

One judge wanted still more deference

Judge VanDyke joined the opinion in full and wrote separately to say the court should do better at deferring. Urias-Orellana alone, he predicted, “likely won’t make much of a difference here in the Ninth Circuit,” in part because a panel eager to reverse can usually find precedent to do it. He quoted Judge Bumatay, who called the circuit’s persecution cases “a bit of a ‘choose-your-own-adventure.’” “Imagine asking every ‘reasonable adjudicator’ on earth,” he wrote, whether this combination of events is persecution. “Unless every single one of them answers ‘yes,’ then we should not disturb the agency’s finding.” A decision overturning a no-persecution finding, he added, “should be an exceedingly rare breed.”

He also made a remark that applicants should know about. In a footnote, he said several of Singh’s allegations “bear a striking resemblance” to those in other Indian asylum applications, and that circuit precedent has made it “unreasonably difficult” for the agency to find such accounts not credible. He acknowledged that the agency made no adverse credibility finding here and assumed Singh’s allegations were true. He closed with a remark on the system itself: The outcome of a petition, he wrote, “often hinges solely on which judges are drawn for the panel.”

Those are one judge’s views.

The Board has since reached the same kind of result

Four months after the amended opinion, the Board decided Matter of V-S-A-, 30 I&N Dec. 37, Interim Decision #4244 (BIA Sept. 10, 2026), a case arising in the Ninth Circuit. An immigration judge had believed a Mann Party supporter from India and granted him asylum. The Department of Homeland Security appealed and prevailed on two fronts.

The first was harm. Citing the panel’s original opinion, DHS argued that the applicant had suffered no significant injuries. The judge had found that he was threatened, pushed from a motorcycle and beaten with hockey sticks, and on a later occasion pushed, beaten and kicked. The Board agreed with DHS “even if the respondent is viewed as credible.” It wrote that “the fact that the respondent sought medical treatment and only required medication signifies that the harm and injuries were not sufficiently serious.” For that conclusion the Board cited Sharma and E-M-F-S-, not either opinion in Singh’s case.

That posture differs from Singh’s. The Ninth Circuit could ask only whether the record compelled a different answer. The Board decides de novo, without deferring to the judge, whether harm rises to the level of persecution, as it said in Matter of E-M-F-S-, 29 I&N Dec. 379, Interim Decision #4154 (BIA Jan. 9, 2026). So an immigration judge’s grant on facts like these is exposed if DHS appeals.

The second was credibility. DHS filed 12 redacted declarations from other Indian asylum cases to show shared wording. The judge gave them little or no weight, out of concern for privacy and the lack of cross-examination. The Board held that redaction protects the other applicants and that cross-examination is not required when declarations are offered only to compare their words. On remand, the judge must look for “identical phrases or words, the same grammatical mistakes and punctuation, the use of distinctive language, or the unnecessary addition of extraneous detail.” The Board expressed no view on the final outcome. Read beside Judge VanDyke’s footnote, the practical point is plain: An account needs detail that belongs only to the person telling it, in words that are that person’s own.

What to check if your denial says the harm was not enough

• Each reason for the denial. Separate what the judge believed from what the judge concluded. A win on the level of harm does not end a case if a relocation finding stands, and a relocation finding needs its own challenge.
• The injuries, stated specifically. The panel looked at what was and was not reported: concussion, fracture, lasting effect, the treatment needed. Medical records and testimony have to say it. Under 8 U.S.C. § 1252(b)(4)(A), the court decides only on the administrative record, so what the hearing record omits stays omitted.
• The links between incidents. Identify who acted, whether the same people returned, any party or police connection, and what they said. Singh shows how quickly a claim thins when attackers are unknown and the events look unconnected.
• The exact words of any threat. The panel treated a vague warning as weak evidence and noted that Singh received no death threats. Our guide to death threats and persecution proof covers that question.
• The facts the panel used to distinguish other cases. Having to flee after repeated attacks, age at the time and harm to family members all figured in the comparison.
• Who carries the relocation burden. Find out whether past persecution was found and whether the persecutors are the government or government-sponsored. Then answer any country report the agency relied on with evidence about the place proposed. If you would keep working for your party after moving, say so in your testimony and ask the judge to address it.
• Your declaration, in your own words. After V-S-A-, DHS can put similarly worded declarations from other cases in front of the judge. A preparer’s template is a risk.
• Every form of relief, in every brief. Singh’s torture claim ended because it went unraised.

For representation in a removal case, see our deportation defense practice.