In the
United States Court of Appeals
For the Seventh Circuit
No. 10-3673
Y AN L IN,
Petitioner,
v.
E RIC H. H OLDER, JR., Attorney General
of the United States,
Respondent.
Petition for Review of an Order of
the Board of Immigration Appeals.
No. A 98 997 626
S UBMITTED JUNE 29, 2011 —D ECIDED A UGUST 30, 2011
Before C OFFEY, F LAUM, and M ANION, Circuit Judges.
M ANION, Circuit Judge. Yan Lin left her home in
China’s Fujian province to seek asylum in the United
States based on allegations that family-planning
We granted petitioner’s unopposed motion to waive oral
argument. Thus, the petition for review is submitted on the
briefs and record. See Fed. R. App. P. 34(f).
2 No. 10-3673
authorities forced her to have an abortion. An immigra-
tion judge (“IJ”) denied the application, concluding that,
although Lin credibly testified to having an abortion, she
failed to establish that it was involuntary. The IJ’s assess-
ment of Lin’s credibility turned on Lin’s submission of
hospital certificates that purportedly documented her
forced abortion, which, he concluded, suggested that
the procedure was actually voluntary. The Board of Im-
migration Appeals affirmed that decision. It agreed
with the IJ that, absent other evidence explaining the
certificates, our reasoning in Huang v. Gonzales, 453
F.3d 942 (7th Cir. 2006), a case which also involved
the validity of a Chinese abortion certificate, justified
the adverse credibility finding. We conclude that the
Agency overstated our holding in Huang and in doing so
provided an incomplete and unsupported assessment of
Lin’s credibility. We therefore grant the petition for review.
At her hearing before the IJ, Lin described the circum-
stances leading to her abortion. She testified that, in
1992 when she was 20 years old, she moved in with
her boyfriend and soon became pregnant. She decided
to keep the baby even though Chinese law forbade unmar-
ried women to have children, and after a few months,
Lin’s parents were warned that their salaries would be
cut if Lin refused to terminate the pregnancy. Despite
this threat, Lin still wanted to keep the baby, so she
took sick leave from her own job at a movie theater
and moved to the countryside to stay with her grand-
mother. But these efforts to evade authorities were unsuc-
cessful; four family-planning officers discovered Lin
at her grandmother’s house when she was nearly six
No. 10-3673 3
months pregnant. She tried to flee, and when that failed
she begged the officers to leave her alone. The officers
ignored her pleas and forced her to accompany them to
a hospital that was about an hour from her grand-
mother’s home. At the hospital, doctors examined her,
and she was then locked overnight in a room with
other women. The next morning someone at the hospital
forced Lin onto an operating table and gave her an injec-
tion in her stomach. Sometime the next day she began
to experience contractions, and after hours of labor,
the premature baby was stillborn. Her family took her
home two days later.
Lin also told the IJ about the emotional and physical
consequences of her abortion. She testified about debil-
itating depression, strained personal relationships, and
an inability to keep a steady job. Although the IJ
would conclude otherwise, Lin testified that she was not
allowed to return to her job at the movie theater
after the abortion. And her situation deteriorated more
beginning in 1997 when she experienced an ectopic preg-
nancy, which she says doctors attributed to a mistake
in the abortion procedure five years earlier. At that
point she learned that it would be difficult for her to
have children in the future; with this news, her boy-
friend abandoned her, and potential suitors refused to
consider marrying her. These events, Lin said, prompted
her to seek asylum in the United States.
Lin corroborated her claim of a forced abortion with
two types of evidence. She attached a letter from her
mother confirming her version of events as well as two
4 No. 10-3673
documents that she said were issued by the hospital. One
of those documents was an outpatient medical record
from the Lianjiang County Red Cross Hospital stating
that the procedure was “due to pregnancy without mar-
riage.” The other document was a “disease certificate”
bearing insignia from the same hospital, stating that her
“diagnosis” was abortion. Neither document specifies
whether the procedure was voluntary; they merely state
that Lin had an abortion and recommend two months
of bed rest. Lin testified that the hospital supplied
these documents as a matter of course, not on request,
when she was discharged.
In response to these hospital documents, the govern-
ment submitted the State Department’s 2007 country
profile of Chinese asylum claims. That profile says the
United States Embassy is “unaware of any so-called
‘abortion certificates’ ” and that it knows of no circum-
stance where Chinese women received certificates after
a forced abortion. It adds that “[a]ccording to Embassy
officials, the only document that might resemble and
be confused with such a certificate is a document issued
by hospitals upon a patient’s request after a voluntary
abortion.” That certificate, the report explains, would
aid a Chinese woman’s request for time away from
work following a voluntary abortion.
The IJ denied Lin’s request for asylum after deter-
mining that she was not entirely credible. He noted
that, although Lin’s testimony that she had an abortion
was “100 percent accurate” and her description of her
relationship with her boyfriend was “extremely credi-
No. 10-3673 5
ble,” he nonetheless disbelieved her contention that the
procedure was involuntary. The IJ concluded that he
was compelled to disregard Lin’s otherwise credible
testimony because she had submitted an abortion certif-
icate from the hospital that performed the procedure.
The IJ reasoned that the certificate, when coupled
by the State Department’s understanding that such cer-
tificates exist only in cases of voluntary abortions, de-
stroyed the credibility of Lin’s assertion that the
abortion was forced. The IJ also found that Lin could
have returned to her position at the movie theater and
added this factor as further evidence that Lin’s abortion
was voluntary. And most significantly, the IJ told Lin
that, even though he didn’t want to send her back to
China, he had to deny her request for asylum “as a
matter of law” because of our decision in Huang, which
the IJ thought “directly contradicted” her claim. In
Huang the IJ relied on a similar abortion certificate
and the same comments from the State Department as
the basis for discrediting the petitioner’s testimony that
his wife had been subjected to an involuntary abortion.
Huang, 453 F.3d at 944. We upheld the decision and
reasoned that the abortion certificate and the country
profile together provided substantive evidence that the
abortion was not forced and that “without additional
corroborating evidence, the IJ was entitled to find [the
petitioner’s] testimony implausible.” Id. at 947.
The Board affirmed the denial of Lin’s application for
asylum. It did not rely on the IJ’s findings that Lin could
return to her previous job at the movie theater (a
correct decision since the IJ’s conclusion on this point
6 No. 10-3673
appears to stem from a misunderstanding of Lin’s testi-
mony), but it did agree with the IJ that the reasoning
in Huang supported the adverse credibility finding.
The Board also endorsed the IJ’s decision because Lin
failed to “provide adequate corroborating evidence to
contradict the 2007 profile.”
Lin’s overarching contention on appeal is that the IJ
erred in concluding that our decision in Huang required
the denial of her application for asylum. Lin primarily
challenges the IJ’s analysis, but the Board adopted
and supplemented that decision, so we review both.
Surganova v. Holder, 612 F.3d 901, 904 (7th Cir. 2010).
Lin’s claim is fundamentally a challenge to the Agency’s
adverse credibility finding, which we must defer to if
it is “supported by specific, cogent reasons that bear a
legitimate nexus to the finding.” Toure v. Holder, 624 F.3d
422, 429 (7th Cir. 2010) (internal citation and quota-
tion marks omitted). The credibility finding fails to
satisfy even this highly deferential standard because
it is based on an inaccurate understanding of circuit
precedent. See Torres v. Mukasey, 551 F.3d 616, 626 (7th
Cir. 2008).
We start with the IJ’s decision. Like the Board, we set
aside the IJ’s erroneous conclusion that Lin was able
to return to her job at the movie theater after her
abortion because nothing in the record supports this
conclusion; the only testimony was to the contrary. Once
we set aside this conclusion, the only remaining reason
the IJ gave for disbelieving Lin’s claim was that our
decision in Huang compelled him to do so. But that
No. 10-3673 7
reason cannot be characterized as “cogent” because it
overstates the holding in Huang. Although we upheld in
Huang the IJ’s decision to consider an abortion certificate
as substantive evidence that could adversely affect an
applicant’s credibility, that decision was not an edict
requiring an adverse credibility finding in every case
involving an abortion certificate. In fact, we explicitly
allowed for the possibility that the negative inference
of the certificates could be overcome with “additional
corroborating evidence.” Huang, 453 F.3d at 947. As
an example of the type of evidence that might suffice,
we noted that Huang, whose wife had allegedly
suffered an involuntary abortion, would have had a
“stronger and more sustainable” claim if he had provided
a supporting affidavit from his wife, who would have
had first-hand knowledge of the abortion. Id.
Thus, instead of viewing Huang as a decision
mandating an adverse credibility finding in Lin’s case,
the IJ should have treated it as an invitation to assess
whether Lin, despite her first-hand knowledge of the
circumstances of her own abortion, could be required to
provide additional proof that she suffered a forced abor-
tion. Of course, the IJ didn’t need such an invitation
because, under the REAL ID Act, Pub. L. No. 109-13, 119
Stat. 231 (2005), he was permitted to require Lin to
supply corroborating evidence as long as the evidence
was reasonably obtainable. See 8 U.S.C. § 1158(b)(1)(B)(ii);
Krishnapillai v. Holder, 563 F.3d 606, 618 (7th Cir. 2009).
Besides her own detached and apparently credible testi-
mony on the matter, Lin did provide one piece of cor-
roboration in the form of a letter from her mother, but
8 No. 10-3673
the IJ failed to acknowledge this evidence or consider
what additional information Lin might reasonably have
supplied. This shortcoming in the IJ’s analysis appears
to stem from the mistaken impression that, in light of
Huang, no amount of corroboration would have been
sufficient to rebut the negative inference of the abortion
certificate.
The IJ’s rote application of Huang to Lin’s case is also
problematic because it suggests that an IJ may base an
adverse credibility finding on country reports alone. We
have repeatedly condemned this sort of over-reliance on
generalized statements of country conditions. See, e.g.,
Bace v. Ashcroft, 352 F.3d 1133, 1139 (7th Cir. 2003) (cau-
tioning against use of generalized reports to contradict
witness’s specific testimony); Galina v. INS, 213 F.3d 955,
958-59 (7th Cir. 2000) (concluding that agency erred
in giving conclusive weight to State Department re-
port). Here, Lin correctly points out that the State De-
partment cannot comprehensively assess conditions
throughout China, so the Embassy’s lack of familiarity
with any hospital issuing abortion certificates following
a forced abortion cannot rule out the existence of such
a practice, particularly dating back to 1992. Our decision
in Huang acknowledges this limitation in the country
reports. We noted that the reports are “not as well-re-
searched or informative as we might wish,” but none-
theless recognized their usefulness as evidence tending
to suggest that “a certificate shows only a voluntary
abortion.” 453 F.3d at 947. But that is all the report
is—evidence. Neither the country report nor our
decision in Huang to uphold an IJ’s use of the country
No. 10-3673 9
report can be sufficient to destroy an asylum applicant’s
credibility as a matter of law. Because the IJ mistakenly
attributed this level of significance to our decision in
Huang and, by extension, to the State Department’s
report, we cannot conclude that his credibility finding
was supported by substantial evidence.
The Board’s decision does nothing to materially
change our view of the IJ’s overall credibility finding.
The Board adopted the IJ’s reasoning, and added that
the adverse credibility finding was justified because Lin
failed to provide corroborating evidence to contradict
the State Department’s interpretation of the abortion
certificate. But as we alluded to above, the Board may
require corroboration only when it is reasonable to do
so. Krishnapillai, 563 F.3d at 618. Here, Lin provided an
affidavit from a family member to corroborate her own
testimony. We cannot envision other readily available
evidence that might have helped prove the forced nature
of her abortion, especially when the IJ found her testi-
mony about her strenuous efforts to avoid the abortion
as being credible. Also, the Board did not identify any
such evidence that it found lacking. In order to deny
Lin’s claim for asylum based on a lack of sufficient cor-
roboration (beyond the mother’s letter), the Board
needed to both explain why it was reasonable to expect
further corroboration and account for Lin’s failure to
provide it. Tandia v. Gonzales, 487 F.3d 1048, 1054-55 (7th
Cir. 2007). Neither the Board nor the IJ considered either
of these factors, so the Board’s additional reasoning that
Lin failed to corroborate her claim is insufficient to
justify the decision to deny asylum.
10 No. 10-3673
Because the Agency’s credibility determination was
based exclusively on an over-broad understanding of
our decision in Huang, we cannot uphold the denial of
asylum as being supported by substantial evidence. We
therefore V ACATE the Board’s order and R EMAND for
a fresh assessment of Lin’s credibility.
8-30-11