Chen v. Holder, No. 12-2563 (7th Cir. 2013)
Annotate this CaseThe petitioner, a Chinese citizen from Fujian Province, entered the U.S. in 1997 and is the mother of two boys born in the U.S. She sought asylum on the ground that she is likely to be forcibly sterilized if returned to China. The immigration judge and the Board of Immigration Appeals denied her application on the ground that she has no well-founded fear of sterilization. The immigration judge also found that she could relocate to a part of China in which the one-child policy is not enforced as enthusiastically as in Fujian. The Seventh Circuit vacated, first noting that the 2007 petition was timely because the birth of a second child resulted in changed circumstances, 8 U.S.C. 1158(a)(2)(D). The petitioner claims that after the birth of that child, Chinese authorities, who may have learned of the birth from her parents’ customary party to celebrate it, ordered her (via a letter to her father) to report for sterilization and subsequently revoked her village registration. The court noted that forced sterilization and forced abortion in Fujian have been documented and stated that the Board has not attempted “to construct an empirical basis … for its skeptical attitude toward these applicants.”
Some case metadata and case summaries were written with the help of AI, which can produce inaccuracies. You should read the full case before relying on it for legal research purposes.
This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.