On September 10, the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) — the DOJ tribunal that reviews certain immigration court decisions — issued an opinion in Matter of V-S-A-, concluding an immigration judge (IJ) misapplied precedent in finding an Indian national asylum applicant credible notwithstanding DHS’s presentation of “12 separate political opinion-based” applications filed by other Indian nationals that were purportedly “similarly worded”. Skip the legal part and you’ll see that asylum fraud — and not just the applicant himself — was on trial.
The Form I-589
Immigration officers, practitioners, and experts use many shorthand terms, and “asylum application” is one of them.
It actually refers to the Form I-589, “Application for Asylum and for Withholding of Removal”, because aliens seeking humanitarian protection use just one form to seek not only asylum under section 208 of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), but also withholding of removal (“statutory withholding”) under section 241(b)(3) of the INA and protection under the Convention Against Torture (CAT).
Section A of that form requests information about the applicant and the applicant’s family, while section B is the real meat, asking for the specifics of the applicant’s persecution and/or torture claim.
In addition to the space available for responses on the I-589, applicants may also submit separate narratives with the application, and most do — though in many instances those expanded statements are filed separately from the form itself and closer in time to the merits hearing.
V-S-A-’s Claims
As noted, V-S-A- is an Indian national. He entered the United States on an unspecified date and is removable on grounds not identified in the BIA’s opinion.
As “relief” from removal, he filed an asylum application, and six days prior to the merits hearing before the IJ on that application, he supplemented his I-589 with a declaration asserting that “members of an opposing political party in India attacked and injured him on two occasions because he supported the Mann Party”.
The “Mann Party” is also known as the Shiromani Akali Dal (Mann) after its leader, Simranjit Singh Mann, a former police officer and erstwhile member of the Lok Sabha, the lower chamber of an Indian national parliament modeled after the British House of Commons.
Mann is also referred to as a “known hardline Sikh leader” in India’s northern Punjab state, home to more than 30 million people, the majority (nearly 60 percent) of whom follow the Sikh religion — not Hinduism, the majority faith in India as a whole.
A Brief Discourse on Political and Religious Issues in India
Conflict has brewed in the Punjab between Sikh separatists, who want an independent state called “Khalistan” (“land of the pure”), and the Indian government since the early 1980s, and at times that conflict has turned violent — most notably in 1984, when the Indian government of then-Prime Minister Indira Ghandi launched “Operation Blue Star”, a direct attack on the Golden Temple, the Vatican of Sikhism, in the Punjab city of Amritsar.
As Britannica explains: “Five months later Gandhi was killed in her garden in New Delhi in a fusillade of bullets fired by two of her own Sikh bodyguards in revenge for the attack in Amritsar”, at which point she was replaced by her son, Rajiv, followed by plenty of rancor and violence to go around on all sides.
Though the violence has largely abated, it’s never really gone away, and as Al Jazeera reported in 2023, the government of current Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi “has intensified the pursuit of Sikh separatists and arrested dozens of leaders from various outfits allegedly linked to the movement”.
Modi helms the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which claims to be “the world’s largest political party”, and given it’s the biggest party in the world’s largest democracy, there’s likely a lot of truth in that boast.
Unlike many prior parties that either held majorities in the Lok Sabha or controlled coalitions there, the BJP has a Hindu nationalist ideology, which has at time caused frictions with religious minorities, most notably Muslims and Sikhs.
Given the Indian government’s (at times violent) repression of the Khalistan movement, and the general underlying tensions in Indian politics, most asylum claims from that country are similar to V-S-A-‘s and allege either religious persecution due to the applicant’s Sikh faith or political persecution linked to the applicant’s membership in a party not then in power.
Trust me — there’s a reason I am familiar with India’s politics and its religious demography.
“Similarly Worded Declarations”
On October 6, 2025 — four days after V-S-A- submitted his declaration and two days before the merits hearing on his asylum claim — DHS submitted “copies of similarly worded declarations from 12 separate political opinion-based Indian asylum applications” that it contended “bore boilerplate language hallmarks”, obvious indicia of a fictitious claim.
The department noted that those dozen declarations “contained substantial factual similarities to” the one V-S-A- filed on October 2 and argued that those “inter-proceeding similarities” proved the alien’s claim “was fabricated”.
To comply with regulations that protect against the disclosure of the identities of asylum applicants and the contents of their applications, DHS redacted those declarations to remove personally identifying information, but the IJ was still concerned about “due process issues attached to the declarations” and consequently “assigned little to no weight to DHS’ submission”.
As the BIA described the court’s concerns:
The Immigration Judge explained that she did not know the facts or circumstances in which the 12 documents were created and was concerned particularly with the privacy protections of the 12 other asylum applicants from whose cases the declarations were taken. The Immigration Judge also noted that the respondent in the present case had no opportunity to cross-examine these 12 individuals.
The IJ subsequently concluded that V-S-A- was credible and granted his asylum application.
Matter of V-S-A-
The government appealed, arguing: (1) the IJ’s credibility determination was “clearly erroneous” given that V-S-A-‘s “declaration bears striking inter-proceeding similarities to those of the 12 other individuals”; (2) the IJ “clearly erred in disregarding and assigning reduced or no weight to the 12 redacted declarations”; and (3) the IJ blundered in giving those declarations “reduced weight”.
The Board agreed, sustaining the government’s appeal and reaffirming its 2015 opinion in Matter of R-K-K-, wherein it established a three-step framework for IJs to follow when (as here) they are asked to consider “significant similarities between statements submitted by applicants in different proceedings”, to preserve the fairness of those proceedings.
At step one, the applicant must be given “meaningful notice of the similarities that are considered to be significant” and then step two must receive “a reasonable opportunity to explain the similarities” and rebut the claim that his statements are simply fabricated boilerplate.
Finally, in step three, the IJ must “consider the totality of the circumstances in making a credibility determination”, which is what immigration judges are already required to do in every contested case.
“This framework”, the Board in Matter of R-K-K- concluded, “will permit Immigration Judges to draw reasonable inferences of falsity from inter-proceeding similarities while establishing procedural safeguards to protect faultless applicants” — and also give the BIA and other reviewing courts an opportunity to check the IJ’s work.
Expanding on that Matter of R-K-K- framework, the BIA clarified that the government wasn’t required to make the 12 other declarants available for cross-examination because DHS submitted their declarations “for the limited purpose of establishing similarities in the words and phrases therein” and not “for the truth of the statements” those affiants made (the essence of “hearsay”).
Specific Findings
To the extent the IJ did look at the other 12 declarations, she concluded that the similarities were not sufficient to otherwise undermine what she deemed to be the applicant’s credible evidence.
Specifically, the IJ focused on what the BIA termed “broad factual differences” between S-V-P’s declarations and the others, including that some of the other declarants claimed membership in the Indian National Lok Dal Party” (INLD), not the Mann Party; that V-S-A- contended he was “motivated by the Mann Party’s anti-drug message whereas some of the declarants did not discuss that issue and were instead motivated by caste discrimination or the creation” of Khalistan; and that V-S-A-‘s claims were supported by a local elected official, the “village Sarpanch”, whereas “local authorities did not support other declarants”.
The Board explained that instead of looking at the broader commonalities or differences between S-V-P’s declaration and the others, the IJ should have focused instead on “word for word repetitions”, “repeated similarities in narrative structure”, and “unique, detailed factual similarities” in those submissions.
As the BIA explained, that analysis is consistent with the Ninth Circuit’s 2025 opinion in Singh v. Bondi — yet another Punjab asylum claim that was premised on the applicant’s affiliation with the Mann Party — and its 2024 opinion, Singh v. Garland (ditto).
In Garland, the circuit court reversed an IJ’s adverse asylum decision that was premised on the similarity between the alien’s claims and 20 other declarations that were submitted in accordance with Matter of R-K-K-, not on “any similarities in language, grammar, or narrative structure between Singh’s affidavit and any of the twenty redacted declarations submitted by the government below”.
That’s logical because political harms in specific regions of certain countries likely share many common elements, but in any event (and other words), the IJ in Garland made the same error in arriving at a negative credibility determination that the IJ in Matter of V-S-A- did in arriving at a positive one.
The IJ in Bondi, on the other hand, did what the Ninth Circuit in Garland demanded, focusing on word-for-word repetitions in the seven declarations submitted, “repeated similarities in narrative structure” among those declarations, and “unique, detailed factual similarities” — including what the circuit described as “the specific occupation of the Good Samaritans who (always) come to the rescue” when political attacks occurred.
To remedy these errors, the BIA remanded Matter of V-S-A- to the IJ to “assign appropriate weight to the admissible and properly redacted declarations and reassess the respondent’s credibility” under the standards in these precedent cases “by clearly identifying the similarities in the affidavits”.
The “Same Script”
With due respect to those who leave their homelands in genuine fear of persecution and torture — and I have both argued and granted such claims — fabricated asylum applications involving multiple applicants who make almost identical claims are nothing new, nor is this phenomenon limited to the United States.
On September 6, the Times of London published an article headlined “Just 1% of asylum pleas are genuine, says insider”, which began:
Only one in 100 asylum claims are genuine, according to a whistleblower who has revealed widespread fraud and dysfunction in the system.
The [UK] Home Office official, who has worked for years as a decision-maker on asylum and has assessed thousands of claims, said asylum seekers from certain countries use the “same script” in what he and colleagues describe as “package claims”.
He said he had encountered a large number of Iraqi Kurds claiming asylum who said they had been in a relationship with the daughter of the prime minister of the Kurdistan region. The official said it had become a “running joke” among colleagues that the number of Iraqi Kurds who said they were involved with the daughter was in the “hundreds”.
He also said that “hundreds” of claims from Pakistanis were based on the assertion that they were in fear of their lives in their home country because of their gay relationship with the same man who had provided letters supporting their claims.
What has changed in the brazenness with which applicants — and those who are assisting them — are making those claims, and their sheer laziness in doing so.
Consider that bogus applicants have become so sloppy that between October 2024 (when Garland was issued) and last week, three major opinions have been issued laying out a map for adjudicators to follow when considering identical language in largely identical asylum applications — or that the “notoriously liberal” Ninth Circuit is a trailblazer in ferreting out the fraud.
Maybe asylum fraudsters hoped DHS and IJs would miss the fact that many of them were following the “same script”, and that they could hide within the backlog of 2.3 million I-589s pending in the immigration courts. As Matter of V-S-A- reveals, now that fraud is on trial, that hope is quickly fading.