Urquilla-Pereira: Credible Family-Gang Fears Still Required Evidence of the Applicant’s Own Risk

When a relative disappears and a gang demands money from your family, the fear can be real even when important details remain unknown. An asylum decision must still connect the evidence to the protection sought by the individual applicant. In Urquilla-Pereira, the immigration judge accepted the applicant’s testimony as credible. The Third Circuit nevertheless upheld the denial because the agency’s findings about past harm and future risk were supported by that testimony and the rest of the record.

The family encounters included serious uncertainties

Erika Evelin Urquilla-Pereira, a Salvadoran citizen, entered the United States as an unaccompanied minor in August 2015. She later sought asylum, withholding of removal and protection under the Convention Against Torture, known as CAT. She gave birth to a son in 2019.

Her cousin Milton had disappeared. She suspected MS-13, but testified that no one knew whether he was alive or dead, whether the gang had targeted him, or why. Her father paid MS-13 $25 a month following threats. Masked men who were possibly gang members once confronted her sister on the street with questions about her father. Urquilla-Pereira also testified that the gang had never harmed, threatened or spoken to her, and that her family otherwise continued living in the hometown undisturbed. Urquilla-Pereira sets out those distinctions between known events and suspicion.

The BIA’s actual reasons defined the court’s review

The immigration judge found her credible but denied relief. During the hearing, counsel had said he could not ethically propose a legally cognizable social group. The BIA affirmed on specified grounds: No past persecution, no well-founded fear of future persecution and insufficient likelihood of torture. Those reasons were important because the federal court reviewed the grounds the BIA actually used.

Under Myrie v. Attorney General, 855 F.3d 509, 515 (3d Cir. 2017), the court considers the immigration judge’s reasoning to the extent the BIA adopted it. It does not treat every earlier reason as the final agency’s reason. Factual findings receive substantial-evidence review: The court must uphold them unless the evidence would compel a reasonable adjudicator to reach the contrary conclusion. The Urquilla-Pereira opinion explains both limits.

Credibility did not supply the missing connection to her risk

The court recognized the fear created by the cousin’s disappearance and the father’s extortion. It also examined what those events established about Urquilla-Pereira. The cousin’s fate and the gang’s involvement were unknown. The record did not establish that MS-13 would do to her what she feared had happened to him. The gang had not demanded money from her, and the family continued living in the town without the other harm she feared.

Those facts supported the BIA’s findings on both past persecution and future fear. The point was the evidence of this applicant’s risk, evaluated under deferential factual review. The court described asylum’s future-fear route as requiring a subjectively and objectively reasonable fear, separate from proof of earlier persecution. Urquilla-Pereira connects the evidence to those requirements.

The social-group arguments addressed a different ground

On appeal, Urquilla-Pereira argued for groups defined as Salvadoran females and Salvadoran single mothers. The BIA’s affirmance, however, had rested on persecution and fear rather than the legal validity of a group. The court therefore treated those group arguments as outside the grounds it was reviewing. It similarly declined to examine the immigration judge’s reliance on earlier Attorney General decisions because the BIA had expressly disclaimed relying on them.

This was an actual boundary of the agency decision, not a finding that the proposed groups failed the legal test. An appeal needed to confront the fear and risk findings supporting the denial. Urquilla-Pereira explains why the group discussion could not displace those findings.

Withholding and CAT required their own likelihood findings

Withholding of removal required a clear probability of persecution—a more demanding likelihood showing than asylum’s well-founded fear. Because the evidence failed to establish the lower likelihood showing here, it also failed the higher one. That reasoning concerned this failure of proof about persecution risk.

CAT required proof that torture was more likely than not, with public officials committing or acquiescing in it. Urquilla-Pereira relied on dangerous country conditions, but the court found insufficient specific evidence that she personally was likely to face torture. It cited Tarrawally v. Ashcroft, 338 F.3d 180, 188 (3d Cir. 2003), for the insufficiency of country conditions alone on that question. The court denied the petition for review. Urquilla-Pereira gives the CAT analysis and disposition.

This Third Circuit memorandum applies that circuit’s review standards to the described record. A California matter requires its governing law and actual agency decisions. Our guide to identifying the BIA’s reasons explains how to separate a credibility finding from the grounds that still need to be answered.