Safarian

MEMORANDUM *

Lena Safarían, a 76-year old native and citizen of Armenia, petitions for review of the Board of Immigration Appeals’ (“BIA”) summary affirmance of the immigration judge’s (“IJ”) denial of her application for asylum and withholding of deportation. We grant the petition and remand.

We are compelled to conclude that the IJ’s reasoning is not supported by substantial evidence. Gui v. INS, 280 F.3d 1217, 1225 (9th Cir.2002). Safarian’s testimony and the corroborating evidence in the record support her contention that she was repeatedly interrogated, threatened, humiliated, and eventually arrested on account of her political opinion.

The IJ relied on three reasons to find Safarían not credible: (A) the IJ found her testimony and asylum application to be inconsistent regarding the number of times she was arrested; (B) the IJ found inconsistencies between Safarian’s testimony and that of her son, Vartanian, regarding the number of days that Safarían was detained; and (C) the IJ faulted Safarían for not providing corroborative documentation establishing her involvement in the Dashnak Party and her work for the Party’s print shop.

We find that the so-called inconsistency…

dissenting.

The immigration judge did not believe Safarían, did not believe that Safarían was detained, and thus, did not believe the entire claim. Substantial evidence supports this finding. Safarían represented in her application for asylum that she was regularly arrested and a section leader in the Dashnak party, but testified that she was a proofreader who was arrested once. She said at the hearing (May 30,1996) that she did not know what was written in her application, but she had testified under oath on June 28,1996 that she was familiar with the information in her application, had signed it, and that it was true and complete. She had been working for the party for decades, yet provided no documentation of her involvement. She stated in her declaration (October 29,1996) that if she had known that she was applying for asylum instead of for an employment authorization form, she “would have submitted a lot of documents and detailed information, since I arrived in the United States with the only purpose to apply for Political Refugee Status,” yet at the hearing she testified that she didn’t have any documentation because the KGB took her papers when they accused her of…