Carmen Gomez v. Immigration and Naturalization Service

How courts have described this case

Verbatim parenthetical descriptions written by other courts when citing this decision. Ranked by citation-network relevance.

• holding that a social group must be recognizable and discrete, allowing would-be persecutors to identify victims as members of the purported group
• holding that a Salvadoran woman who had been beaten and raped by Salvadoran guerillas during her youth was not for that reason a member of a particular social group for asylum purposes
• explaining that “[l]ike the traits which distinguish the other four enumerated categories–race, religion, nationality and political opinion–the attributes of a particular social group must be recognizable and discrete
• finding that a woman who had been beaten and raped by guerrillas in her youth was not, for that reason, a member of a particular social group for asylum purposes
• defining a “particular social group” as “individuals who possess some fundamental characteristic in common which serves to distinguish them in the eyes of the persecutor – or in the eyes of the outside world in general”
• “Possession of broadly-based characteristics such as youth and gender will not by itself endow individuals with membership in a particular group.”

Source: CourtListener parenthetical corpus (CC0).