Lapuste

MEMORANDUM

Gheorghe Lapuste and Maria Bogdanes-cu, natives and citizens of Romania, petition for review of a decision by the Board of Immigration Appeals (“BIA”) denying their request for humanitarian asylum. We deny the petition for review. Because the parties are familiar with the history of the case, we need not recount it here.

Humanitarian asylum may be granted where a petitioner has suffered “atrocious forms of persecution,” Kebede v. Ashcroft, 366 F.3d 808, 812 (9th Cir.2004) (citation and internal quotation marks omitted); Matter of Chen, 20 I. & N. Dec. 16, 19 (BIA 1989), but “has been reserved for rare situations ... where the alien establishes that, regardless of any threat of future persecution, the circumstances surrounding the past persecution were so unusual and severe that he is unable to return to his home country,” Vongsakdy v. INS, 171 F.3d 1203, 1205 (9th Cir.1999).

The BIA concluded that, although La-puste had suffered persecution, his experiences were not “comparable in severity” to those in Vongsakdy and Chen. It concluded that his experiences were more like Marcu v. INS, 147 F.3d 1078 (9th Cir. 1998), in which we denied relief to a Romanian applicant…