An immigration judge denied her requests for asylum and withholding of deportation and believed that the same legal standard applied to both claims.

The Ninth Circuit ruled that the BIA had incorrectly applied the same standard to Cardoza's claims for both asylum and withholding of deportation since the statutes giving the Attorney General authority to grant those forms of relief to aliens were phrased differently.

A person is eligible for the discretionary relief of asylum if he is a refugee by being "unable or unwilling to return to, and is unwilling or unable to avail themselves of the protection of, [their home] country because of persecution or a well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion."

In contrast, a person is eligible for the mandatory relief of withholding deportation by demonstrating a "clear probability of persecution" if he is returned to his country.

Then, the INS argued it would be anomalous to have a lower standard for asylum that afforded greater benefits to an alien than withholding deportation.

Justice Antonin Scalia stressed that he concurred in the judgment of the Court merely because he believed that it had reached the right result.

He pointed out that the BIA's interpretation of both "well-founded fear" and "clear probability of persecution" were not mathematical in nature but were instead qualitative determinations.

The question in this case, whether those objective components are materially different, and if so, how, "is just the type of expert judgment—formed by the entity to whom Congress has committed the question—to which we should defer."

There was no reason to suppose that the BIA's formulation of the standard was inconsistent with Congress's definition of the statute, particularly in light of what Powell considered an ambiguous legislative history.

Also, Powell asserted the BIA had actually applied the lower standard the Court had identified to the evidence presented in this case.