Zoghbi

MEMORANDUM *

Wassim Zoghbi appeals the decision of the Board of Immigration Appeals (“BIA”), adopting the ruling of an Immigration Judge (“IJ”) that deemed his asylum application abandoned because he left the country for 19 days to go to Lebanon — the country from which he seeks refuge — where his father was undergoing heart surgery. We hold that the IJ improperly decided that petitioner had abandoned his application. Because petitioner sought advance parole prior to departure, his claim is governed by 8 C.F.R. 208.8(b), which provides that:

The IJ reasoned that Zoghbi “went with a father who chose to go there because medical care was cheaper.” “Since, in fact, his father didn’t have a compelling reason to go there, he just went there to save money on the operation, I find the respondent did not have a compelling reason to go.” We agree with Zoghbi that the IJ’s focus should have been on whether petitioner had a compelling reason to accompany his father to Lebanon, not whether Zoghbi’s father had a compelling reason for seeking medical treatment there. Tending to the serious illness and surgery of his father provided petitioner with a compelling reason to go to Lebanon. See…

concurring in part and dissenting in part.

I agree that an applicant should not be presumed to abandon his application when, as here, he returned to the country of origin for his father’s operation. However, I do not believe that the immigration judge was compelled to find that any of the incidents upon which Zoghbi relies amounted to persecution. The house burning was untargeted, random, war-related violence, as was what happened at the checkpoint. The Hesbollah checkpoint was not there to target Zoghbi in particular or Christians in general; it was there to keep non-Hesbollahs out of their sector. The guards mistreated the Muslims in the group as well as the Christians, albeit not quite as offensively. It was a scary, but one-time, event. The police responded to Zoghbi’s complaint, abandoning their investigation only when they learned that Zoghbi had left for the United States. There is no evidence that his family, which returns frequently to Lebanon, has been harassed at all, nor was Zoghbi when he returned. In these circumstances, the IJ was not compelled to find that Zoghbi would encounter similar difficulties in the future; there is nothing in the record to suggest that the…