Manukyan
Manukyan v. Ashcroft
Opinion
Lead Opinion
*646 MEMORANDUM *
Petitioners Gohar Manukyan and her husband, Arshak Manukyan, filed a petition for review, contending that the immigration judge (“IJ”) erred in finding that they had not credibly established Mrs. Ma-nukyan’s Turkish ethnicity and that the Board of Immigration Appeals’ (“BIA”) ruling was “boilerplate.” They also request that we equitably toll their period to voluntarily depart. Because the BIA adopted the decision of the IJ, we review the IJ’s decision as though it were the BIA’s. Hoque v. Ashcroft, 367 F.3d 1190, 1194 (9th Cir.2004).
Petitioners’ credibility was in question because a forensic document examiner determined that the data on Mrs. Manuk-yan’s birth certificate had been chemically altered. The IJ allowed petitioners about a month to respond, advising them to read In re 0-D-, 21 I. & A. Dec. 1079 (BIA 1998), in which the BIA sustained an adverse credibility determination due to the submission of false documents. At the subsequent hearing, petitioners neither presented testimony from Mrs. Manuk-yan’s sister, who lived in the city where the hearing was held, nor provided an explanation for her absence. We conclude that petitioners’ failure to produce…