Why Your Lawyer Wants a Country Conditions Expert

“Why do I have to pay for an expert? Everyone knows my country is dangerous.” We hear some version of that question in almost every torture-protection case we prepare. It is a fair question, and it deserves a straight answer, because the money is real and the family paying it often has very little.

The short answer: a protection case is won on evidence about you, not about your country. Part of that evidence only you and your family can gather, and it costs nothing but effort. Part of it only an expert can supply. An expert is worth paying for when he or she can speak to your situation, and close to worthless when all the expert does is repeat the State Department report. A September 2026 Board decision, made binding precedent by the Attorney General on October 27, 2026, shows what happens when the record is about the country and not about the person.

What happened in Matter of K-Y-V-R-?

In Matter of K-Y-V-R-, 30 I&N Dec. 203 (BIA 2026), a young man from El Salvador had refused gang recruitment from childhood until he left the country at 17. Gang members threatened him, threw rocks at his house and once assaulted him at school. In January 2020 an immigration judge granted him protection under the Convention Against Torture (CAT). The government appealed. More than six years later the Board of Immigration Appeals reversed and ordered him removed.

The Board gave two reasons, and neither was that El Salvador is safe:

• Nothing showed the gang still wanted him. He did not testify that the gang members had looked for him since he left in 2015. In the Board’s words: “The record is also devoid of any evidence that his family members residing in El Salvador or anyone close to the respondent have been questioned or targeted by gang members since the respondent left the country.” (30 I&N Dec. at 205.)
• Nothing showed he could not live somewhere else in El Salvador. He had never tried to relocate, he had uncles who work as police officers there, and he is now an able-bodied adult. The judge had relied on general country conditions evidence, and the Board found that evidence did not support the prediction that he could not relocate.

The judge’s grant rested heavily on what the Board called “general country conditions evidence that is not particular to the respondent.” (Id. at 204.) The Board’s rule, borrowed from the Third Circuit where the case arose: “The specter of torture must be supported by specific evidence that the individual applicant is more likely than not to be singled out.” (Id. at 204–05, quoting Hernandez Garmendia v. Att’y Gen., 28 F.4th 476, 484 (3d Cir. 2022).)

Two things the decision does not say. It does not say what evidence the lawyer looked for or what the client was willing to do, and we will not guess. And it does not say an expert would have saved the case. Look at the first gap again: whether the gang has asked about him since 2015 is something his family in El Salvador would know. That is fact evidence, and it is free.

What does “particularized” evidence mean in a torture case?

It means evidence that answers four questions about you, not about people in your country generally:

1. Who would harm you? A named group, a specific person, a unit of the police, not “criminals.”
2. Why you, rather than everyone else who lives with the same danger?
3. How would they know you are back, and how would they find you if you moved to another city?
4. Why would officials take part, consent or look the other way?

Under the regulation, the applicant carries the burden of showing torture is “more likely than not” (8 C.F.R. § 1208.16(c)(2)), and the judge must consider all relevant evidence, including past torture, the possibility of relocating, and conditions in the country (§ 1208.16(c)(3)). Country conditions are on that list. They are context. The Board has said in case after case since 2025 that context alone does not show that a particular person will be targeted. Our CAT protection guide walks through each element and the Board’s recent decisions; this page is about the practical question of how you build the evidence.

What evidence can only you and your family provide?

This is the part clients most often skip, and it is the part that sank K-Y-V-R-. It costs no money. It does take time, phone calls to relatives who may be frightened, and honesty about facts that are painful. What we usually ask for:

• Declarations from family and neighbors about who came asking for you, when, what they said, and whether anything has happened to the family since you left. Dates matter. “They came in March 2024 and asked my mother where I was” is evidence; “they are still looking for him” is a conclusion.
• Documents of the threats themselves: police reports (even ones the police did nothing with), screenshots of messages, photos of damage, a note left at the house, medical records from an assault.
• What happened to people like you whom you know personally: a cousin who also refused the gang, a coworker who returned and was detained. Death certificates, news clippings that name them, statements from their families.
• Evidence that the danger followed you: threats after you moved within your country, contact after you left, messages to your phone in the United States.
• Your own detailed testimony. The regulation says your testimony, if credible, “may be sufficient to sustain the burden of proof without corroboration.” (8 C.F.R. § 1208.16(c)(2).) That is a real rule, but you should not build a plan on it. Judges look for corroboration that is reasonably available, and your family’s declaration is the kind of corroboration a judge will expect.

We give each client a written questionnaire, in the language the client reads best (for most of our clients that is Spanish or English), that walks through exactly these questions: who you fear, what they have done, who in your family has been contacted and when, and what you believe would happen if you returned. If you have already written your asylum declaration, these facts belong in it too, consistent with what your family says.

One more thing about timing. In Matter of S-K-E-, 30 I&N Dec. 27 (BIA 2026), the judge had left the record open after the hearing only for updated criminal records. The respondent filed country reports, call logs, witness affidavits and employment records instead, and the Board held that the judge permissibly declined to consider them, adding that the respondent had not shown the late evidence would have changed the outcome (id. at 29–30). Evidence that arrives late may never be read. When we give you a deadline for family declarations, the deadline is the court’s, not ours.

What can a country conditions expert prove that you cannot?

An expert supplies what neither you nor your family can know from personal experience. In the cases we see from Central America, that usually means:

• Reach. Does this gang, or this faction, operate across the whole country, or only in your region? This is the relocation question that was the Board’s second reason in K-Y-V-R-.
• Tracking. How do groups like this identify and find people who return, and how long do they hold a grudge against someone who refused them?
• Your profile now. What happens today to a deportee, to someone with tattoos, to a former recruit, to a woman who left a gang member, to someone with your specific history?
• Risk from the government itself. In El Salvador, the state of exception declared in March 2022 has been extended month after month; as of October 2026 the Legislative Assembly had approved its 56th extension. For some returnees the realistic danger now comes from detention, not only from the gangs. The Board has held that anecdotal reports of abuse in Salvadoran prisons are not enough to show that a particular person would more likely than not be tortured there (Matter of A-A-R-, 29 I&N Dec. 38, 41–42 (BIA 2025)), so the question becomes whether someone with your profile is likely to be detained, what happens to people like you inside, and whether the harm is inflicted on purpose. The Board has held that harsh prison conditions alone, without a specific intent to cause severe pain or suffering, are not torture (id. at 43–44).

These are questions of judgment built on research. A judge cannot answer them from a report, and you cannot answer them from memory. That is the job an expert is hired for.

Why isn’t the State Department report enough?

Because it is about everyone, and because it may now cut against you. The State Department’s human rights report on El Salvador covering 2024 (released in August 2025, and the latest we have found as of November 2026) states: “There were no credible reports of significant human rights abuses.” (2024 Country Report on Human Rights Practices: El Salvador.) An immigration judge will read that sentence. A case that relies only on official reports has nothing to set against it.

The Board has also said that an expert is less helpful when all he or she does is interpret country condition reports and news articles, which judges read regularly and understand without help. In Matter of G-M-I-, 29 I&N Dec. 431 (BIA 2026), it held: “Generalized evidence that would otherwise be insufficient to establish an individualized clear probability of torture is not rendered sufficient merely because an expert witness reviews it and opines that a respondent is likely to be tortured.” (Id. at 436; see id. at 432.) An expert who reads the same reports the judge has and adds a conclusion adds a fee, not proof.

What makes a country conditions expert worth paying for?

Since early 2026 the Board has published a run of decisions that tell you what a weak expert looks like. Read together, they also tell you what a strong one looks like.

What the Board has said about weak experts

• The advocate who will not consider the other side. In Matter of D-J-L-, 29 I&N Dec. 485 (BIA 2026), the expert ran a nonprofit that helps deportees and had co-written an article urging that all deportations to Haiti stop. The Board said that ordinary bias, such as an expert who usually testifies for one side, “does not necessarily render the testimony of a witness inadmissible” (id. at 487), but held that a judge errs in giving significant weight to an expert whose background and testimony show a reluctance to consider contrary evidence and an inability to assess removals to that country impartially (id. at 487–88).
• The expert built on anecdotes, or wrong facts. In G-M-I-, the expert’s prediction rested on two stories that did not match the respondent’s situation, one of them described inaccurately. The Board held that an expert’s opinions are “significantly undercut when those opinions are informed by anecdotal or inaccurate facts or data.” (29 I&N Dec. at 435.)
• The expert who strays outside his or her field. In an unpublished July 2025 decision, the Board held that an immigration judge should not have relied on an expert’s opinion about Salvadoran prison conditions, because the judge had qualified her as an expert in general country conditions but not in prison conditions (BIA, Annandale, July 17, 2025; unpublished and not precedent, but it shows how the Board reads expertise). The Board treats the scope of an expert’s qualification as meaningful in published decisions too (S-K-E-, 30 I&N Dec. at 30).
• The assumption that “expert” means “decisive.” In S-K-E- the Board repeated that “[n]othing requires an Immigration Judge to give special consideration to the testimony or declaration of an expert witness” and quoted its older rule that expert testimony “is evidence and so is treated the same as all evidence in immigration proceedings.” (30 I&N Dec. at 30, quoting Matter of M-A-M-Z-, 28 I&N Dec. 173, 177 (BIA 2020).)

Notice who appealed. In D-J-L-, G-M-I- and S-K-E-, and in K-Y-V-R- itself, the immigration judge had granted protection, the government appealed, and the Board took the grant away. Immigration judges read these decisions. Our expectation (a judgment, not a rule) is that a one-sided or generic report will now count for very little, because a judge who leans on one invites reversal. That is the practical reason to avoid such experts, even before the cost.

What a strong expert looks like

• A researcher, not a report writer. Ideally a university professor or a policy researcher who has done his or her own fieldwork or published research on the country and the specific group you fear. Not someone whose main work is writing declarations for immigration cases.
• Speaks to you. The report applies the research to your facts: your region, your history, the people who threatened you, what your family has reported since you left.
• Engages the contrary evidence. A good expert addresses the State Department’s 2024 sentence head-on, explains the drop in reported gang violence under the state of exception, and says why the risk to someone like you remains. D-J-L- shows the risk of an expert who will not engage the contrary evidence, and engaging it is what makes the opinion believable.
• Is current. A report written before 2022 describes a different El Salvador.
• Will testify if needed, and can stand up to cross-examination by the government’s lawyer.

I spent five years as a college professor before I became a lawyer. Good researchers can be objective, and a careful, balanced opinion from someone who does real research is far more persuasive than an advocate’s. You do not want someone who writes what you want written. You want someone the immigration judge, the Board and a federal court of appeals will take seriously.

Do courts in the Ninth Circuit treat experts differently?

Somewhat, and it matters for Montana. Petitions for review go to the federal court of appeals for the circuit where the immigration judge completed the case, and in our cases that is usually the Ninth Circuit; many Montana cases are heard by the Portland Immigration Court. If you are detained and your case is moved to a court in another state, a different circuit’s law may apply. The Ninth Circuit has repeatedly sent cases back when the agency brushed aside expert evidence about the individual:

• A credited expert cannot be rejected just because nothing else repeats what the expert said. The court put it this way: “If an expert’s opinion could only be relied upon if it were redundant with other evidence in the record, there would be no need for experts.” (Castillo v. Barr, 980 F.3d 1278, 1284 (9th Cir. 2020).) In Velasquez-Samayoa v. Garland, 49 F.4th 1149 (9th Cir. 2022), a Salvadoran case about a man who feared being identified as a gang member, the court granted the petition and sent the case back in part because the agency rejected the expert’s testimony solely because other country conditions evidence did not corroborate it.
• Expert evidence about the individual must be considered and can carry real weight. In Parada Calderon v. Blanche (9th Cir. Aug. 28, 2026) (a published opinion; as of November 2026 we are watching for any rehearing request), another Salvadoran case, the applicant filed a motion to reopen with three expert reports about what would happen to someone with his history, gang ties and tattoos. The Board did not discuss two of the reports and dismissed parts of the third as anecdotes that could not substitute for quantitative evidence. The Ninth Circuit granted the petition, held that expert testimony can be “highly probative [and] potentially dispositive evidence” that the Board must consider (quoting Cole v. Holder, 659 F.3d 762, 772 (9th Cir. 2011)), and rejected the Board’s demand for quantitative evidence. Judge Bea dissented, reading the Board as following earlier Ninth Circuit precedent rather than inventing a new rule. The posture was a motion to reopen, not a full hearing: the court ordered the Board to reopen the case, and it did not grant protection.
• Relocation is one factor, not something you must disprove. In Maldonado v. Lynch, 786 F.3d 1155, 1164 (9th Cir. 2015) (en banc), the court held that the regulation does not require a CAT applicant to show that relocation within the country is impossible; it is one factor among all the evidence. You still carry the overall burden.

Our judgment (not a ruling): K-Y-V-R- faulted the record because it “did not show that the respondent could not internally relocate” (30 I&N Dec. at 203, syllabus). In a case that reaches the Ninth Circuit, that framing sits uneasily with Maldonado, and we expect the relocation half of K-Y-V-R- to carry less weight here. The other half, that the evidence must show what is likely to happen to you, holds in the Ninth Circuit too, although that court has said country conditions evidence alone can sometimes carry the burden (Uc Encarnacion v. Bondi, 156 F.4th 927, 941 (9th Cir. 2025)). Do not count on that; build the individual record. Do not read the Ninth Circuit cases as a reason to skip the work. They protect a good record; they do not create one.

The same evidence also matters for withholding of removal and asylum, which have different legal tests but turn on the same question of what is likely to happen to you.

How much does a country conditions expert cost?

In our experience as of November 2026, a written expert report usually runs from about $1,000 at the low end to about $3,000 at the high end, depending on the country, how much original work the case needs, and whether the expert will also testify. That is the range we see in our own cases, not a survey of the market.

And the honest part: no lawyer can promise that an expert will win your case. I cannot point to a case and say the expert made the difference, because no one can try the same case twice, once with an expert and once without. The effect is cumulative. What the published decisions do show is the pattern on both sides: cases lost because the record was about the country (K-Y-V-R-), and cases sent back because the agency set aside an expert who spoke to the individual (Velasquez-Samayoa, Parada Calderon).

How we help you find the right expert

Finding the expert is part of our job, not a chore we hand to you. In a case we take, we:

• identify what the record is missing before anyone is hired, so the expert is asked a precise question rather than “is my country dangerous”;
• look for a researcher with published work on your country and the group you fear, and search published Board decisions and federal court opinions for what judges have said about that person’s past testimony, so we do not hire someone a judge has already found one-sided;
• give the expert your declaration, your family’s statements and the documents you gathered, so the opinion is about you;
• ask the expert to deal directly with the evidence that cuts against you, including the latest State Department report;
• file the report on the court’s deadline, and prepare the expert if testimony is needed.

This is why we ask for your family’s declarations first. An expert who has them can write about you. An expert who does not can only write about your country.

What should you ask when your lawyer asks for an expert?

Ask one question: “What will the expert address that the record does not already show?” A good answer names a specific gap, such as whether the gang operates in the city where the government says you could move, or what happens to returnees with your history. A vague answer (“experts help”) is a reason to talk more before paying.

Then do the free part. Call your family. Get the dates, the names of who came asking, the messages, the reports. That evidence is what the record in K-Y-V-R- was missing, and no expert can invent it.

If you are in removal proceedings and fear torture, persecution or death if you are sent back, we can review your case, tell you honestly where the record stands, and help you build it. Start with our asylum application guide, or read about appeals and motions in immigration court if your case has already been decided. If the honest answer is that the case is weak, we will say so, and talk with you about options such as voluntary departure. Our removal defense practice serves clients across Montana and the Rocky Mountain West.