Karapetyan

MEMORANDUM *

Slavik Karapetyan, a native and citizen of Armenia, petitions for review of the denial of his application for asylum, withholding of removal, and protection under the Convention Against Torture (CAT). We have jurisdiction under 8 U.S.C. § 1252 (a). We grant the petition for review, reverse the adverse credibility determination, and remand on an open record for further proceedings.

I.

Under 8 U.S.C. § 1252 (d)(1), we have jurisdiction only if Karapetyan has exhausted his administrative remedies by challenging the adverse credibility finding-before the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA). See also Vargas v. INS, 831 F.2d 906, 907-08 (9th Cir.1987) (“Failure to raise an issue in an appeal to the BIA constitutes a failure to exhaust remedies with respect to that question and deprives this court of jurisdiction to hear the matter.”). The immigration judge (IJ) denied *716 Karapetyan asylum because she found several aspects of his testimony incredible. However, she did not otherwise address the substance of Karapetyan’s claims and offered no alternative reason for denying relief. The BIA affirmed the IJ’s decision without opinion in a one-member order, making the IJ’s…

dissenting:

I decline to join my colleagues’ disposition because I conclude that we have no jurisdiction to assess the adverse credibility determination. A challenge to the adverse credibility determination was not raised by Petitioner to the BIA in Petitioner’s appeal of the IJ decision.

The majority recognizes that our jurisdiction is limited to review of issues that have been properly exhausted before the BIA. See Vargas v. INS, 831 F.2d 906, 907-08 (9th Cir.1987). But the majority concludes that the issue of adverse credibility was implicitly presented in the IJ’s decision, which it claims the BIA had to review before making its summary affirmance. 1 Although I agree that before entering a summary affirmance a BIA judge must approve the result reached by the IJ, I do not agree that the BIA judge must *719 intuit a challenge to an IJ’s adverse credibility determination when that challenge is not raised in the brief to the BIA and when that brief explicitly states that the IJ did not question Petitioner’s credibility.

The Supreme Court has made clear that in the habeas corpus context we cannot review an issue raised by a state court prisoner if the issue was not “fairly…