[00:00:40] Speaker 03:
petitioners.

[00:00:43] Speaker 03:
To start, I'd like to just briefly review the basic facts of the case.

[00:00:50] Speaker 03:
The case takes place in Tegucupa, Honduras.

[00:00:55] Speaker 03:
This case will turn on whether the family that I will discuss is legally defined as a particular social group.

[00:01:10] Speaker 03:
My family consists of Edgar, 43 at the relevant time, Nayeli, his daughter, five years old, Allison, 14.

[00:01:24] Speaker 03:
She was the daughter who was involved in the problem with the gang.

[00:01:41] Speaker 06:
Did the other petitioners, did they file their own paperwork, their own applications, or are they derivative of the father?

[00:01:50] Speaker 03:
They are derivative of the father.

[00:01:52] Speaker 06:
Okay, so we're looking at whether the lead respondent established an exodus between his past harm, severe future harm, and membership in a PSG, right, a particular social group.

[00:02:04] Speaker 06:
So could you focus on that?

[00:02:13] Speaker 03:
The father is the lead respondent by virtue of being the oldest and the male in the family.

[00:02:23] Speaker 03:
But the gravamen of the case involves Allison, the 14-year-old.

[00:02:28] Speaker 05:
Well, that's the problem I think we're trying to get at because it enhanced the question about I think there's just the one application.

[00:02:35] Speaker 05:
That's what you answered in response to Judge Ikuta's question.

[00:02:38] Speaker 03:
Yes, there's one application.

[00:03:16] Speaker 03:
who found out that his daughter had been sexually assaulted by a member of the 18th Street transnational gang.

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El Travieso, also known as the mischievous one, at knife point raped Edgar's daughter in

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So at some point, the lead respondent went searching for his daughter, found her in the street.

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She was crying.

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El Travieso said, stay out of this.

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You don't have anything to do with this.

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And he showed the father his gun.

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And the father explained, I don't want any trouble.

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I just want my daughter.

[00:04:21] Speaker 02:
It sounds like what he

[00:04:28] Speaker 02:
intervene and protect the woman who was his daughter, but that suggests basically resistance to crime, not something that's a protected ground.

[00:04:40] Speaker 03:
Well, what happened next was that El Tribeso informed Lee, respondent father,

[00:04:59] Speaker 02:
El Travieso threatened him.

[00:05:01] Speaker 02:
I'm still looking for the link to a protected ground.

[00:05:05] Speaker 03:
Well, the link to the protected ground is that after the initial phase of the sexual assault, El Travieso then started calling the family.

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Why?

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In order to try to find the daughter, Allison.

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But the problem was, he began a harassment

[00:05:33] Speaker 02:
But again, we're still missing a protected ground there.

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That's the fact that he has sexual interest in the daughter, not that there's anything political, religious, social.

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It's all about his sexual demands and the family's desire to protect the daughter.

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But what makes that a protected ground?

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conflict, but for their status as a family.

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And they would not be involved if they hadn't tried to intervene to protect the daughter.

[00:06:15] Speaker 02:
But that's crime.

[00:06:19] Speaker ?:
That may be, that certainly is crime.

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initial threat which happened in the alley where the perpetrator of the sexual assault threatened the father.

[00:06:43] Speaker 05:
And I think that that happened after the father intervened.

[00:06:49] Speaker 05:
It seems to me you're drawing a distinction between that and the threats that came afterwards in retaliation for the

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dad goes looking for the daughter, sees her with El Travieso.

[00:07:14] Speaker 05:
We're saying different things.

[00:07:18] Speaker 05:
This got a little bollocked up, it seems to me, but you just have the one petitioner, right?

[00:07:23] Speaker 05:
And the threat to him was not a sexual assault.

[00:07:25] Speaker 05:
The harm to him was not a sexual assault.

[00:07:26] Speaker 05:
The harm to him was the death threat, if we want to call it that, after he intervened, right?

[00:07:32] Speaker 05:
And then there were other threats that he is complaining of.

[00:07:37] Speaker 05:
But that's his harm.

[00:07:42] Speaker 03:
But my argument is that because as father or the lead of this family or this social group, he now in this second phase of the relationship between the family and El Travieso, he's now involved in driving

[00:08:14] Speaker 05:
So if I could do it this way, sometimes, I agree with Judge Akuta's point, sometimes there's a, let's just make up a hypothetical, you know, a political coup or something, and there's concern and reason for concern that a rival's gonna take out somebody's entire family.

[00:08:30] Speaker 05:
Maybe the relative had nothing to do with the political coup, but after the dust settles, there's reason to conclude that an opponent's family is at risk.

[00:08:41] Speaker 05:
And that seems to be quite different than what you're talking about.

[00:08:43] Speaker 05:
That's what we're trying to get at.

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who's the father was threatened because he was the father as opposed to because he intervened.

[00:08:56] Speaker 03:
The argument that this lead respondent is now drawn in to the harm that initiated in the first phase, but as the lead person responsible for this group of people,

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argument implicates this notion of a protected, a particular social group that is worthy of government protection.

[00:09:27] Speaker 06:
Do you want to save some of that for rebuttal?

[00:09:31] Speaker 03:
Yes.

[00:09:32] Speaker 03:
You have a minute and 12 seconds.

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Ultimately,

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protect the family from the harm.

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And the immigration judge suggested that, well, the country of Honduras has created programs for women's issues.

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The problem is, those protections relate to after-the-fact situations,

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for destination child sex.

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With that, there's no government entity able to protect women on the front end of sexual assault in spite of the government's creation of programs and places to help after the fact.

[00:10:45] Speaker 03:
Your time has expired.

[00:11:05] Speaker 01:
may please the court, Edward Durant, on behalf of the United States.

[00:11:09] Speaker 01:
Before I start my argument, I just want to correct a couple things.

[00:11:12] Speaker 01:
I don't know if counsel's recitation of the facts, even though some of them aren't relevant to Nexus, are accurate.

[00:11:19] Speaker 01:
I just want to correct those.

[00:11:20] Speaker 01:
The record does not indicate

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but rape is a stronger term in addition.

[00:11:31] Speaker 01:
It doesn't look like the father went looking for terms.

[00:11:34] Speaker 01:
Three days later, the only time that the father had any interaction with El Travioso was in a grocery store, and it appears to be by chance because when he took Allison away from this gangster, the guy didn't even know who he was.

[00:11:48] Speaker 01:
So it seemed to be a heated sort of

[00:11:51] Speaker 01:
by chance argument, nothing to do with the father looking for the daughter, but that was just a correction on the facts, and they were just erroneous.

[00:11:59] Speaker 05:
But with respect to the case here, it turns on nexus and substantial evidence supports the agency's decision that petitioners or the father… Could you help us straighten out the decision tree, because now you just use the word petitioners, and I understand that there's one petitioner, and I think opposing counsel indicated in response to Judge Akuta's question, that's his understanding as well.

[00:12:21] Speaker 01:
Yes, Your Honor.

[00:12:22] Speaker 01:
I misspoke.

[00:12:23] Speaker 01:
The lead petitioner is the father.

[00:12:25] Speaker 01:
And the question is whether, I guess, he established a nexus between El Travioso's actions and a protected ground.

[00:12:32] Speaker 01:
And what this case is, this is Rodriguez and Yiga, a similar case where there was a lady and someone went up to her, I guess it was an ATM, and said, if you don't give us your money, we're going to kill your child.

[00:12:53] Speaker 01:
This El Chavioso wanted a sexual relationship with this girl.

[00:12:58] Speaker 01:
When he couldn't get it, when the father intervened, when he didn't, when the gangster didn't think he was going to get what he wanted, he blurted this threat.

[00:13:05] Speaker 01:
It's just that instrumentality has nothing to do with the family.

[00:13:08] Speaker 05:
He would have... Could I, could I get, again, I'm really just interested in the decision tree first.

[00:13:14] Speaker 05:
Is it, is it the government's position that we're looking at one petitioner and we're trying to figure out whether he had a correct nexus?

[00:13:21] Speaker 01:
Well, based on this case,

[00:13:27] Speaker 05:
That's helpful to me.

[00:13:29] Speaker 05:
We have this case.

[00:13:31] Speaker 05:
I don't know that it's going to matter today.

[00:13:33] Speaker 05:
But the government, I think, may be taking a different or inconsistent position.

[00:13:37] Speaker 05:
And either of that or I'm misunderstanding.

[00:13:40] Speaker 05:
So let's just go to a hypothetical.

[00:13:42] Speaker 05:
Here, we have one petitioner.

[00:13:44] Speaker 05:
And I think you've answered the question about Nexus.

[00:13:47] Speaker 05:
And what question should we be asking for Nexus?

[00:13:49] Speaker 05:
The Nexus, based on where it is?

[00:13:51] Speaker 05:
If we have just a hypothetical scenario where there's one petitioner,

[00:13:57] Speaker 05:
them, derivative beneficiaries who have also filed their own applications, then how do we do it?

[00:14:04] Speaker 01:
Well, I'm not familiar with that case.

[00:14:06] Speaker 05:
I do – I'm not asking – this is a hypothetical case.

[00:14:08] Speaker 05:
I'm just trying to figure out the government's position on the decision tree.

[00:14:13] Speaker 05:
If the – if Allison had had her own

[00:14:21] Speaker 01:
I think you looked directly at her too, but she didn't.

[00:14:24] Speaker 01:
She looks like she filed an application, but everything reverts back to the parents' declarations.

[00:14:29] Speaker 05:
So are you familiar with our recent decision in Corpano, Romero versus Garland?

[00:14:34] Speaker 01:
I am not familiar with that case, Sean.

[00:14:36] Speaker 05:
No, no problem.

[00:14:37] Speaker 05:
That's fine.

[00:14:38] Speaker 01:
But just in this case here... I'm not going to apply here.

[00:14:59] Speaker 01:
father who's getting in the way of something he wants.

[00:15:00] Speaker 01:
If the gang member thought that hurting someone's house, their family dog, anything that would get in the way of his goal, that's what he was doing.

[00:15:12] Speaker 01:
With respect to

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of torture.

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One was that they have a functioning police system.

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Two, they criminalize rape.

[00:15:32] Speaker 01:
And even if the victim doesn't report it, they have reporting centers for women.

[00:15:36] Speaker 01:
And it looks like in all the municipalities, over 250 of them, they have women's centers there to help women for all things, whether medical, emotional, or criminal.

[00:15:47] Speaker 01:
So while it's not perfect in Honduras,

[00:15:58] Speaker 01:
of the record, it does not indicate that Honduras would turn a blind eye.

[00:16:02] Speaker 04:
Was there any report to the police here?

[00:16:04] Speaker 01:
I'm sorry, ma'am.

[00:16:05] Speaker 04:
Was there any report to the police?

[00:16:06] Speaker 01:
No, no, ma'am.

[00:16:08] Speaker 01:
They declined a report to the police.

[00:16:11] Speaker 01:
That's what I recollect.

[00:16:14] Speaker 01:
So if the court doesn't have any further questions, I can conclude now.

[00:16:19] Speaker 01:
I don't have any further questions.

[00:16:20] Speaker 01:
Thank you.

[00:16:34] Speaker 06:
This is the method.