Rodrigo

MEMORANDUM **

Vuyanee Rodrigo petitions for review of the Board of Immigration Appeals’ denial of her application for asylum and withholding of removal. We deny the petition.

We review legal conclusions of the BIA de novo, de Martinez v. Ashcroft, 374 F.3d 759, 761 (9th Cir.2004). To the extent the BIA adopts the IJ’s decision as its *574 own, we treat the IJ’s statement of reasons as the BIA’s in reviewing the appeal. Gonzalez v. INS, 82 F.3d 903, 907 (9th Cir.1996). The BIA’s determination that an alien is not eligible for asylum must be upheld if “supported by reasonable, substantial, and probative evidence on the record considered as a whole.” INS v. Elias-Zacarias, 502 U.S. 478, 481 , 112 S.Ct. 812 , 117 L.Ed.2d 38 (1992). We can reverse the BIA only “if the evidence presented ... was such that a reasonable factfinder would have to conclude that the requisite fear of persecution existed.” Id.

It was not unreasonable to conclude that Rodrigo did not establish, 1) that she was persecuted or, 2) that she has a well-founded fear of future persecution in her native Sri Lanka. It is uncontested that members of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam brutally raped Rodrigo and that…

dissenting.

The BIA concluded that the “mistreatment experience^] by the [petitioner] was not on account of a protected ground.” I cannot agree. Vuyanee Rodrigo was raped in her home by Bala Singham, a leader of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) militia, who told her “this is the punishment for you Sinhalese women who betrayed us” and “this is what Sinhal people like you will get.” Because Rodrigo was raped at least in part because of her ethnicity, our cases establish that this is sufficient to prove past persecution.

An asylum applicant need not prove her past persecution was perpetrated solely on account of a protected ground. Mixed motives are acceptable. Garcia-Martinez v. Ashcroft, 371 F.3d 1066, 1076 (9th Cir.2004). In Ali v. Ashcroft, we overturned the BIA’s finding that there was no ethnic persecution where “the attackers’ words themselves evidence[d] that they were motivated, at least in part, by [petitioner] Ali’s clan status and political opinion, and not solely by criminal opportunism.” 394 F.3d 780, 786 (9th Cir.2005). While gang-raping petitioner Ali during a burglary, Somali militia members “contemporaneously declared that Ali was ‘getting what [she]…