Petition for review of an order affirming an asylum officer’s negative reasonable-fear determination; The court’s jurisdiction; 8 USC § 1252; “Final order of removal”; Riley v Bondi; Orders addressing Convention Against Torture (CAT) relief & withholding relief; Nasrallah v Barr; Johnson v Guzman Chavez; Abrogation of Kolov v Garland

Concluding that Riley abrogated its contrary holding in Kolov, the court held that it lacked jurisdiction to hear petitioner-Castro-Fuentes’s petition for review challenging an IJ’s no-reasonable-fear finding because he did not challenge his final order of removal. Thus, it dismissed his petition. The court noted that it has “subject matter jurisdiction to review final orders of removal.” Three recent Supreme Court decisions have “explained what qualifies as a ‘final order of removal’ under” § 1252. Pursuant to those decisions, such “orders are those ‘concluding that the alien is deportable or ordering deportation.’” Importantly for this case, “Riley instructed that orders addressing withholding and CAT relief do not meet that definition because neither affects ‘the validity of a previously issued order of removal.’” The no-reasonable-fear finding petitioner challenged was “a procedural precursor to statutory withholding and CAT relief. Because a challenge to a denial of statutory withholding and CAT relief (or a precursor to such relief) is not a challenge to a ‘final order of removal’ or to an order that ‘affect[s] the validity of the final order of removal,’” the court lacked jurisdiction to hear this petition for review under Riley. This holding departed from its “precedent, which for some time has permitted ‘review of BIA orders on withholding-only and CAT relief.’” The court noted that at least three other circuits, relying “on similar, post-Riley reasoning,” have agreed with the conclusion it reached here.