Denying asylum on firm resettlement in Armenia, a country added as an alternative destination after the evidence closed, was error, because the regulation permits denial only where a third country has offered resettlement without harm or persecution.
Caution The frequently quoted notice passage at 1041 addressed a point the INS had conceded and was not the dispositive ground; the court decided the case on 8 C.F.R. section 208.13(d) (1999). The brief corrects the year: this decision is 1999, not 2000. That regulation has since been replaced, and the text now printed at 8 C.F.R. 208.13(d) and 1208.13(d) must not be quoted as the rule this decision applied. In 1999 the provision read: “An asylum application may be denied in the discretion of the Attorney General if the alien can be removed to a third country which has offered resettlement and in which the alien would not face harm or persecution.” The phrase “offered resettlement” appears nowhere in either section today, checked against the Code of Federal Regulations on 14 September 2026. The present paragraph (d) is a different provision listing adverse discretionary factors, introduced by the rule published at 85 FR 80274 on 11 December 2020. The government recorded at 86 FR 15069 that on 8 January 2021, in Pangea Legal Services v. Department of Homeland Security, a district court preliminarily enjoined the departments “from implementing, enforcing, or applying the [Global Asylum final] rule . . . or any related policies or procedures.” The Department of Homeland Security ratified the rule at 90 FR 51989 on 19 November 2025, in a notice that does not mention the injunction. The Center for Gender and Refugee Studies reports that the injunction remains in place and the case is administratively closed; the Coalition has not confirmed that from the court record. The Code of Federal Regulations carries no note of any of this.
Notice Third-country designation Withholding of removal
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