Jian Liang v. Garland, No. 18-2257 (2d Cir. 2021)
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The Second Circuit denied a petition challenging the denial of petitioner's application for asylum, withholding of removal, and relief under the Convention Against Torture following a determination by an IJ that he was not credible. The IJ concluded that petitioner was attempting to bolster his application through false testimony and determined that petitioner was not credible.
The court explained that, while a factual omission is ordinarily less probative of credibility than an inconsistency, the omission here concerned material information that petitioner would be expected to have divulged earlier in the process. In this case, petitioner's inclusion on a blacklist was the difference between him being the victim of a discrete instance of harassment at the hands of local police on the one hand and the target of a coordinated campaign by national officials to persecute petitioner because of his religion on the other. Therefore, how petitioner knew that he was on that list, then, was critical to his application. Because petitioner failed to raise these facts earlier, and given petitioner's father also omitted this information from his letter, the court concluded that there was substantial evidence supporting the agency's adverse credibility determination.
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