1. Introduction
This case concerns a Colombian family’s unsuccessful challenge to the denial of withholding of removal. Rodrigo Andres Gonzalez Mosquera, Maria Alejandra Contreras Ramirez, and their minor child sought protection after reporting threats, harassment, sexual violence, and an apparent attempted shooting associated with members of the Tren de Aragua gang. Todd Blanche, substituted as United States Attorney General, was the respondent.
The central legal issue was not whether the family had experienced serious harm. The immigration judge found the petitioners generally credible and concluded that the harm suffered by Gonzalez Mosquera cumulatively reached the level of persecution. The decisive question was whether that persecution occurred because of a legally protected characteristic. The court also addressed procedural fairness, administrative exhaustion, and the responsibility of self-represented litigants to verify legal authorities, including authorities potentially generated by artificial intelligence.
The decision illustrates a fundamental distinction in protection law: credible evidence of severe violence does not, by itself, establish eligibility for withholding of removal. The applicant must also prove the required connection between the harm and a protected ground.
2. Background and Procedural History
The family’s experiences in Colombia
The petitioners entered the United States without inspection in May 2023 and were placed in removal proceedings. Gonzalez Mosquera testified about childhood sexual assault and, later, his work as a chef and community volunteer in Bogotá. Through his Catholic church, he helped provide cooking workshops and social activities for vulnerable youth.
Beginning in April 2022, gang members threatened him over his community activities, used racial slurs concerning his dark complexion, and made derogatory remarks about his relationship with his wife and child. He reported threats to police but was told that officers could not act without the perpetrators’ names.
His wife described an October 2022 sexual assault by four gang members. Neighbors activated an alarm after hearing her screams, causing the attackers to flee. She did not report the assault because she could not identify the men, and she subsequently avoided leaving home alone.
In late April 2023, an unidentified motorcyclist pointed a gun at Gonzalez Mosquera’s chest and pulled the trigger, but the weapon did not fire. Police again could not assist because he could not identify the attacker. The family fled Colombia slightly more than a week later.
The agency’s decisions
The family applied for asylum, withholding of removal, and protection under the Convention Against Torture. The immigration judge denied all three forms of relief:
- Asylum: The judge found the petitioners ineligible under the Circumvention of Lawful Pathways Rule because of the timing, place, and manner of their entry.
- Withholding of removal: Although Gonzalez Mosquera’s cumulative harm amounted to persecution, the judge found no sufficient connection to a protected ground. The judge also found that he had not established the Colombian government’s inability or unwillingness to protect him from future persecution.
- Convention Against Torture protection: The judge found insufficient proof that Colombian officials would acquiesce in the petitioners’ torture.
The judge applied the same withholding analysis to the wife and child because their applications relied on the same underlying circumstances. The Board of Immigration Appeals affirmed the withholding denial on the protected-ground nexus issue and rejected the petitioners’ procedural objections for lack of prejudice.
The asylum and Convention Against Torture rulings were not challenged before the Board, which deemed those claims waived. The petitioners did not seek appellate review of that waiver determination. Consequently, the Tenth Circuit did not review the merits of either form of relief.
4. Legal Reasoning
A. The standard of review shaped the result
Because a single Board member issued a brief affirmance, the court reviewed both that order and the portions of the immigration judge’s reasoning on which it relied. Legal conclusions received independent, or de novo, review. Factual findings received substantial-evidence review.
Under 8 U.S.C. § 1252(b)(4)(B), administrative factual findings remain conclusive unless any reasonable adjudicator would be compelled to decide otherwise. This is materially different from asking whether another factfinder could reasonably have reached a different result. The court treated persecutor motive and the required nexus as factual matters, making that deferential standard central to the outcome.
B. Severe persecution and a protected-ground nexus are separate requirements
Withholding of removal requires a clear probability of persecution on account of one of five protected grounds identified in 8 U.S.C. § 1231(b)(3)(A): race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.
The immigration judge’s finding of persecution therefore resolved only part of the eligibility inquiry. It did not establish why the perpetrators acted. Similarly, finding testimony credible did not require the agency to accept a particular legal characterization of the perpetrators’ motives.
The petitioners checked the particular-social-group box on their applications but did not identify a specific group or otherwise clearly articulate a protected ground. The agency also found insufficient evidence that gang members had attributed a political opinion to Gonzalez Mosquera or sought to punish his beliefs. Instead, it understood the gang’s conduct as motivated by general criminal objectives, including preserving territorial influence and control.
The Tenth Circuit held that the record did not compel rejection of that account. Its reasoning does not establish that community work can never generate a political-opinion claim, or that gang violence can never qualify as persecution on a protected ground. It establishes only that the required connection was not compelled by this record.
C. The racial slurs warrant careful treatment
The factual narrative includes explicit racial insults. Those facts are potentially relevant because race is a statutory protected ground. Nevertheless, the opinion offers no separate, detailed analysis of their evidentiary significance. It recounts the agency’s broader conclusion that the threats and harassment did not establish the required nexus and then upholds that conclusion under substantial-evidence review.
This limits the decision’s broader significance. It should not be read as announcing that racial slurs are legally irrelevant or categorically insufficient to establish racial motivation. The holding is record-specific, and the opinion does not articulate a general rule for weighing such evidence.
D. The government-protection finding was not the appellate court’s dispositive rationale
The immigration judge also found inadequate proof that Colombian authorities were unable or unwilling to protect Gonzalez Mosquera from future persecution. The Board’s affirmance and the court’s withholding analysis, however, centered on nexus.
Accordingly, this decision should not be treated as establishing that police refusals to act without an attacker’s identity necessarily demonstrate adequate state protection. Nor does it equate the government-protection inquiry for withholding with the separate official-acquiescence inquiry under the Convention Against Torture.
E. The court left the scope of an immigration judge’s record-development duty unresolved
The petitioners argued that the immigration judge failed to develop a separate basis for relief for Gonzalez Mosquera’s wife. The court acknowledged that circuit precedent had not expressly recognized an affirmative duty to develop the record for an unrepresented applicant.
Rather than decide whether such a duty exists, the court assumed it for purposes of analysis. Even on that assumption, the petitioners had to show prejudicial inadequacy: a deficiency capable of affecting the outcome.
The Board had concluded that the judge considered both spouses’ experiences and still correctly found no nexus. On judicial review, the petitioners offered general assertions that the wife’s claim was not separately evaluated and that the resulting prejudice was extreme. They did not identify a demonstrated failure to develop the record or explain how additional development could have changed the dispositive nexus analysis.
The decision therefore does not authorize automatic consolidation of every family member’s distinct claim. Its narrower point is that a procedural challenge requires an identified deficiency and a meaningful explanation of potential prejudice.
F. Administrative exhaustion and appellate waiver performed different functions
The court declined to consider claims that prior counsel failed to submit police reports and other evidence, and that the judge ignored psychological trauma and risks associated with the wife’s pregnancy. Those specific theories had not been presented to the Board, and the government invoked the exhaustion requirement in 8 U.S.C. § 1252(d)(1).
Separately, the court treated objections concerning the statutory right to counsel and service of notices to appear as abandoned because the opening appellate brief did not address them, even though the Board had considered them.
These are distinct procedural failures: exhaustion concerns giving the agency an opportunity to address a specific legal theory; appellate waiver concerns adequately presenting an issue to the reviewing court. Neither disposition resolved the underlying merits of the omitted claims.
G. Citation accuracy remains the litigant’s responsibility
Under Tenth Circuit Rule 46.5(B)(2), attorneys and unrepresented parties certify that a reasonable inquiry supports the legal contentions in their submissions. The four nonexistent citations and two inaccurate descriptions of real cases violated that obligation.
The panel suspected generative artificial intelligence was responsible, but did not make a definitive finding about how the errors originated. It imposed no sanctions and instead warned that responsibility for accuracy remains with the person submitting the brief, regardless of the technology used.
The opinion thus addresses verification, not a categorical prohibition on artificial-intelligence assistance. Nor does its decision to forgo sanctions create an exemption for self-represented litigants.