95 extensive; what Learning Resources curtails is the ability to bypass the specific procedural constraints Congress has embedded in those statutes by invoking IEEPA’s broader emergency language. 4. Urias-Orellana v. Bondi: Deference and the Standard of Review for Persecution Determinations Background Urias-Orellana v. Bondi concerns a question of administrative law and immigration procedure, but its implications touch on the universal challenge of adjudicating claims of persecution. Petitioners Douglas Humberto Urias-Orellana, his wife Sayra Iliana GamezMejia, and their minor child, all natives of El Salvador, entered the United States without authorization in 2021 and applied for asylum. Under the Immigration and Nationality Act, an applicant qualifies as a “refugee” eligible for asylum if he “is unable or unwilling to return” to his country “because of persecution or a well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.” Urias-Orellana testified credibly that a hitman from his hometown had been targeting him since 2016, had shot two of his half-brothers, and had vowed to kill every member of his family. Despite relocating within El Salvador several times, he was repeatedly tracked down, threatened, and on one occasion physically assaulted. The Immigration Judge credited his testimony but concluded it did not establish past persecution or a well-founded fear of future persecution, and the BIA affirmed. The First Circuit upheld the agency’s determination, applying the deferential “substantialevidence” standard of review. The question before the Supreme Court was whether the courts of appeals must apply this deferential substantial-evidence standard to the agency’s determination of whether undisputed facts constitute “persecution,” or whether they should review that legal application de novo. The Court’s Holding In a unanimous opinion by Justice Jackson, the Court held that the INA requires substantial-evidence review of the agency’s entire persecution determination—both the underlying factual findings and the application of the statutory standard to those facts. The Court grounded its analysis in INS v. Elias-Zacarias, 502 US 478 (1992), which had held that an asylum applicant must show that “the evidence he presented was so compelling that no reasonable factfinder could fail to find the requisite fear of persecution.” Congress’s subsequent enactment of §1252(b)(4)(B)—providing that “administrative findings of fact are conclusive unless any reasonable adjudicator would be compelled to conclude to the contrary”—effectively codified the Elias-Zacarias standard. The Court rejected petitioners’ argument that de novo review should apply because the persecution determination is a “mixed question of law and fact.” The Court observed that the overall determination “primarily requires the IJ to make critical factual findings about a given applicant’s experiences” and that IIRIRA’s amendments tended to restrict, not “Parties who have prevailed in international arbitrations against state-owned entities or sovereign instrumentalities now have a clearer, more reliable pathway to enforce their awards in the United States—one of the most important enforcement jurisdictions in the world.” US — INTERNATIONAL ARBITRATION
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