Zheng v. Holder, No. 12-2566 (7th Cir. 2013)
Annotate this CaseIn 1998, Zheng, under the legal age for marriage in China, became pregnant by her boyfriend, who also was under age. The government family planning officials took Zheng to a hospital, where she underwent an abortion. Zheng left China shortly thereafter, entered the U.S. illegally in 1999, married, and had two children. Zheng sought asylum in 2006, claiming she had undergone a forced abortion and feared that, if returned to China, she would be sterilized for having had two children. In 2008 an immigration judge denied Zheng’s application for asylum and withholding of removal, finding that she had missed the one-year deadline for filing an asylum application, 8 U.S.C. 1158(a)(2)(B), and did not qualify for any exception, and, in the alternative that even if the birth of Zheng’s second child was a circumstance that allowed for an exception to the deadline, asylum would have been denied because the birth of two children in the U.S. does not give rise to a well-founded fear of future persecution. The Board of Immigration Appeals dismissed her appeal and ordered her removed. The Seventh Circuit vacated and remanded.
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