Salazar-De Leon v. Ashcroft

MEMORANDUM **

Josefina Salazar de Leon (“Salazar de Leon”), a native of Guatemala, petitions for review of the Board of Immigration Appeals’s (“BIA”) decision denying her applications for asylum and withholding of deportation. We remand in order to allow the BIA to assess the applications in light of current country conditions in Guatemala.

Because the parties are familiar with the facts and procedural history, we do not recount them here. We review the BIA’s determination of purely legal questions de novo, but we uphold the BIA’s factual determinations so long as they are supported by substantial evidence. See, e.g., Garrovillas v. INS, 156 F.3d 1010, 1013 (9th Cir.1998); Fisher v. INS, 79 F.3d 955, 961 (9th Cir.1996) (en banc). An individual may qualify for asylum by either one of two methods: by showing severe past persecution, or, alternatively, by showing a well-founded fear of future persecution. See Vongsakdy v. INS, 171 F.3d 1203, 1206 (9th Cir.1999). We consider the BIA’s denial of each ground in turn.

I.

We have held that an applicant may qualify for asylum based upon past persecution alone, recognizing that “sometimes past persecution is so horrific that the march…