A divided federal appeals court has ordered immigration officials to give a Salvadoran man a fresh hearing on whether he would likely be tortured if deported, ruling that the Board of Immigration Appeals illegally demanded statistical proof of torture before rejecting his case. Alfredo Parada Calderon, who has visible gang tattoos and spent roughly 34 years in California state prison for murder and attempted murder, has been fighting deportation since federal immigration agents took him into custody immediately after his 2023 parole.
The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decided the case by a 2-1 vote on August 28, ruling that immigration officials made a legal mistake by demanding statistics to prove Parada would likely be tortured in El Salvador, according to the Tampa Free Press. Circuit Judge Kim McLane Wardlaw, joined by Circuit Judge Gabriel P. Sanchez, wrote that immigration judges must consider all evidence relevant to the possibility of future torture, not just data. Sanchez concluded that Parada had presented enough new evidence to warrant a fresh hearing on whether he is more likely than not to be tortured if deported, per the Ninth Circuit's own opinion in the case, which is grounded in federal regulation 8 C.F.R. § 1208.16(c)(3) requiring adjudicators to weigh all relevant evidence rather than impose rigid statistical thresholds.
The court sent the case back to the Board of Immigration Appeals for a full hearing on the merits, with the panel also placing a hold on Parada's deportation in the meantime. Wardlaw wrote that requiring Parada to produce torture statistics imposed a nearly insurmountable burden, and the panel found that immigration officials had failed to properly examine three expert reports submitted by his legal team.
A Violent Past, A Contested Future
Parada came to the United States in 1980 and became a lawful permanent resident in 1990. That same year, at age 16, he participated in a gang shooting outside an El Pollo Loco restaurant in Los Angeles that killed a 12-year-old girl and wounded two people, according to the underlying court record cited by the Tampa Free Press. He formerly belonged to a street gang rivaling El Salvador's dominant criminal groups and was tied to the Mexican Mafia while in prison, records show.
Parada sought protection under the Convention Against Torture, which bars countries from sending people to places where they face a high risk of torture. The Board of Immigration Appeals had denied his request to reopen his proceedings, dismissing expert reports about severe prison abuse and saying personal accounts were insufficient without quantitative evidence — even though the board itself agreed Parada would likely be locked up under El Salvador's State of Exception.
Parada's experts warned that his background places him at extreme risk of violence, mistreatment, or death in prison, pointing to Salvadoran police targeting people with gang tattoos, past criminal records, or U.S. deportee status. Human Rights Watch has documented that Salvadoran authorities systematically profile and detain deportees arriving from the United States who bear gang tattoos or carry past criminal records, transferring many directly into maximum-security confinement without due process, per the organization's November 2025 report.
A Legal Fight Rooted in One Disputed Line
The central legal disagreement traces back to a single line from the Ninth Circuit's 2021 precedent in *Benedicto v. Garland*, which stated that anecdotes — no matter how disturbing — can't substitute for quantitative evidence. The majority ruled that the Board of Immigration Appeals had taken that line out of context to manufacture an unlawful blanket rule, while Circuit Judge Carlos T. Bea dissented, arguing that a three-judge panel lacked the authority to overrule *Benedicto*. Bea also noted that immigration judges need not discuss every document in a case file, said the board had not created a rigid rule requiring statistics, and argued the court should respect the board's original decision.
The ruling arrives amid a broader pattern documented through amici curiae briefs filed in the appeal, which described a troubling trend across U.S. immigration courts of judges demanding statistical or quantitative proof before granting protection under the Convention Against Torture — even though such statistics are rarely available from repressive regimes. That pattern was reinforced by the Board of Immigration Appeals' own April 2025 precedent decision in *Matter of A-A-R-*, which held that general reports of mass arrests and severe prison conditions under El Salvador's State of Exception do not by themselves establish an individual's entitlement to CAT protection without targeted proof, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.
A Widening Split Between Federal Circuits
The Ninth Circuit's decision stands in direct contrast to a March 2026 ruling from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in *Fuentes-Pineda*, which held that severe Salvadoran prison conditions do not amount to torture under the Convention Against Torture absent proof of specific state intent to inflict suffering — a ruling Hoodline covered in a prior report on that case. That decision allowed the deportation of a Salvadoran man convicted of homicide despite documented prison abuse, deepening a divide between how federal appellate courts weigh torture claims tied to El Salvador's crackdown.
El Salvador's State of Exception was declared by President Nayib Bukele in March 2022 after 92 people were killed in a single weekend of gang violence, leading to the arrest of more than 75,000 people and the opening of the 40,000-capacity Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT, in January 2023, according to Human Rights Watch. Constitutional protections including access to legal representation and prompt judicial review remain suspended under the state of emergency, the organization has reported, though El Salvador has made some efforts to improve prison conditions and punish abusive officers.
Parada's legal team at the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project has also pursued a separate federal habeas corpus case, *Parada Calderon v. Bostock*, in the Western District of Washington challenging his prolonged ICE detention without a bond hearing following his California prison sentence, according to filings reviewed through Habeas Dockets. That parallel fight underscores how Parada has remained in immigration custody for years even as his underlying torture claim worked its way through the courts.
