United States Court of Appeals

For the Seventh Circuit

Chicago, Illinois 60604

Submitted January 30, 2013*

Decided June 20, 2013

Before

                     DANIEL A. MANION, Circuit Judge

ILANA DIAMOND ROVNER, Circuit Judge

DIANE P. WOOD, Circuit Judge

No. 12‐2351

CHIA‐I LUI‐DIX,

           Petitioner,

v.

ERIC H. HOLDER, JR.,

Attorney General of the United States,

Respondent.

Petition for Review of an Order of the Board

of Immigration Appeals.

No. A098 172 486

O R D E R

After a court in Taiwan convicted her of using heroin, Chia‐I Lui‐Dix came to the

United States on a student visa, married a U.S. citizen, and had a child here. In a petition for

adjustment of status, however, Lui‐Dix acknowledged her drug conviction. This led the

Department of Homeland Security to determine that she was removable, and so it

commenced these proceedings. An Immigration Judge concluded that the foreign drug

conviction made her ineligible for adjustment of status and ordered her removed, and the

NONPRECEDENTIAL DISPOSITION

To be cited only in accordance with

Fed. R. App. P. 32.1

* The parties agreed to waive oral argument; this appeal is thus submitted on the

briefs. See FED. R. APP. P. 34(f).
No. 12‐2351 Page 2

Board of Immigration Appeals dismissed her appeal. She now petitions this court for

review, arguing that the underlying Taiwanese proceeding lacked critical procedural

safeguards, relied on questionable evidence, and thus could not be held against her. Foreign

convictions, however, need not comply with every detail of U.S. procedure in order to be

accepted for immigration purposes, and Lui‐Dix has not demonstrated that her conviction

in Taiwan was the product of such a fundamentally unfair process that it is subject to

collateral attack in an immigration proceeding. Accordingly, we deny her petition for

review.

I

Lui‐Dix is a native and citizen of Taiwan. In 1996, she was convicted in the Taiwan

Taichung District Court of using illegal drugs. Four years later, in 2000, she entered the

United States on a student visa. She married Paul Dix, a U.S. citizen, and the couple had a

child in 2008. After the marriage, Dix successfully petitioned to have his wife designated as

an alien relative. At that point, Lui‐Dix applied to adjust her status to that of a legal

permanent resident, but her application was denied because of her Taiwanese criminal

conviction. DHS then instituted proceedings to remove her on the ground that her drug‐

related conviction rendered her inadmissible at the time of her entry. See 8 U.S.C.

§§ 1227(a)(1)(A), 1182(a)(2)(A)(i).

According to a translated copy of the Taiwanese court’s decision, Lui‐Dix and her

second husband, Yu‐Ping Lin (who died in prison), were convicted of violating Taiwan’s

Drug Eradication Act after being tried jointly in front of a judge. Lui‐Dix and Lin were

represented by separate counsel at the trial, which lasted about 15 minutes. They did not

have the right to question the chief of police, who was the sole witness at the trial. Lin

confessed, however, to smoking heroin mixed with cigarettes daily and to possessing the

1.22 grams of heroin that the police had seized during a search of the couple’s home.

Although Lui‐Dix denied using drugs, the court credited the results of a urine test,

conducted using the immunoassay and chromatography methods, which indicated that

Lui‐Dix had morphine in her system. Based on this positive result, the court wrote that “we

can only acknowledge that [Lui‐Dix] used the illegal drug one time” within the three days

before the police searched her home. Though the court was not certain about the source of

the morphine in her urine, it stated that “most drug users use heroin. Rarely do they use

morphine. Therefore, the court believes the illegal drug [Lui‐Dix] used was heroin.” It

concluded by noting that “[h]eroin is a drug listed in Article 2 of the Drug Eradication Act.

By using this drug, the defendants committed the crime of drug use . . . .” The court

sentenced Lui‐Dix to three years in prison; she served about a year of that sentence.
No. 12‐2351 Page 3

Lui‐Dix contested her removability based on that conviction in a proceeding before

an immigration judge. In her brief, she attacked as unreliable the urine tests used to convict

her, and she argued that the evidence presented to the Taiwanese court would not have

sufficed to support a guilty verdict under the reasonable‐doubt standard. She also

submitted the written opinion of a clinical chemist and director of a toxicology lab in

Wisconsin, Dr. Joyce Liu Flanagan, who reviewed Lui‐Dix’s urine test results and criticized

the methods used to obtain them. Dr. Flanagan opined that the testers had relied on a

“cutoff value” (that is, a concentration level of morphine in the urine above which the test is

deemed positive) “too low to be meaningful in forensic cases” in the United States. At such

low levels, Dr. Flanagan explained, morphine in the urine can come from legal sources such

as prescription or non‐prescription drugs containing morphine or from food containing

poppy seeds. She also thought that the chromatography and immunoassay tests on which

the Taiwanese court had relied were qualitative tests that were inferior to more advanced

quantitative options. Lui‐Dix’s conviction, Dr. Flanagan concluded, was based on the “false

assumption that the presence of morphine in urine is conclusive evidence of a person’s use

of morphine or heroin.”

The IJ rejected Lui‐Dix’s arguments. He noted that her offense of conviction in

Taiwan (unlawful use of heroin) would also be a crime in the United States. Even though

the standard of proof in Taiwan appeared to be lower than the reasonable‐doubt rule that

would apply in the United States, the judge found that the procedures used to convict Lui‐

Dix were “comparable” to those used here, and that they were adequate to permit his

reliance on the conviction. Declining to engage in an exhaustive examination of the evidence

supporting that conviction, the IJ said that he was “simply not competent to look behind the

judgment to the sufficiency of a foreign court’s conviction.” Because that conviction

rendered Lui‐Dix inadmissible at the time of her entry, the IJ denied her request for

adjustment of status and gave her permission to depart voluntarily within 60 days.

Lui‐Dix appealed to the BIA, which upheld the IJ’s decision. The Board too observed

that the use of illegal drugs is criminal in the United States, and it held that it could rely on

the Taiwanese conviction without considering the procedural adequacy of the trial. The

Board also concluded that Lui‐Dix’s conviction related to a controlled substance, for

purposes of U.S. law. It treated the translated document from the Taiwanese court as

analogous to a U.S. judge’s findings of fact and conclusions of law after a bench trial, and it

did not second‐guess the Taiwanese court’s decision to accept the scientific methodology

used in the urine test. In addition, the Board noted that whether Lui‐Dix actually used

morphine or heroin was immaterial, because both are controlled substances for purposes of

U.S. law. See 21 U.S.C. § 812. The Board ended by remanding the case to the IJ so that he

could instruct Lui‐Dix properly on the procedure for voluntary departure. Lui‐Dix filed a

timely petition for review with this court.
No. 12‐2351 Page 4

II

In her petition, Lui‐Dix continues to maintain that her Taiwanese conviction should

not be considered for immigration purposes, because her trial was unfair and she was

subjected to procedural protections that fell well short of U.S. standards. Although she has

sharpened that argument somewhat before this court, as compared with her submission to

the Board, we are satisfied that she properly exhausted this point. See Juarez v. Holder, 599

F.3d 560, 564 n.3 (7th Cir. 2010). Lui‐Dix complains in particular about the joinder of her

trial with that of her then‐husband, the lack of a right to a jury, the absence of a right to

cross‐examine, the flawed scientific methods used for the urine test, and the insufficiency of

the evidence to prove her guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. More broadly, she contends that

an alien should be permitted to raise a collateral attack against a foreign conviction that is

being used for U.S. immigration purposes, whenever the procedures used in the foreign

tribunal are not “substantially similar to criminal proceedings in the United States.”

Lui‐Dix is mistaken, however, in her assumption that U.S. law insists that foreign

procedures track so closely the procedures used in the United States. Neither civil nor

criminal procedures are uniform among the 193 countries that are members of the United

Nations, yet the great majority of these countries use procedures that are compatible enough

to permit the kind of use of foreign outcomes that Congress has called for in the

immigration statutes. See Pasquini v. INS, 557 F.2d 536, 539 (5th Cir. 1977); Brice v. Pickett,

515 F.2d 153, 154 (9th Cir. 1975); cf. Society of Lloyd’s v. Ashenden, 233 F.3d 473, 476‐77 (7th

Cir. 2000) (discussing differences between the procedures in the United States and the

United Kingdom and explaining why those variations do not prevent recognition and

enforcement of a money judgment). The governing statute here provides that “any alien

convicted of . . . a violation of . . . any law or regulation of . . . a foreign country relating to a

controlled substance . . . is inadmissible.” 8 U.S.C. § 1182(a)(2)(A)(I). Courts normally reject

aliens’ attempts in immigration proceedings to mount collateral attacks on foreign

convictions. See, e.g., Soetarto v. INS, 516 F.2d 778, 780 (7th Cir. 1975) (“Our function is not to

try [] foreign crimes de novo.”); Chiaramonte v. INS, 626 F.2d 1093, 1098 (2d Cir. 1980). Only if

there is some evidence that the foreign conviction was obtained in a manner that falls below

the standards accepted by any civilized system would it be appropriate to delve into these

matters. See Doe v. Gonzales, 484 F.3d 445, 451 (7th Cir. 2007) (remanding case to the BIA to

consider a collateral attack where foreign court was “kangaroo court to make kangaroos

blush,” and conviction was “demonstrably . . . a travesty – a parody – of justice).

Lui‐Dix has not come close to making such a showing, and thus she is not entitled to

relitigate her foreign conviction in her removal proceedings. It would be inappropriate for

us to open the door to attacks on run‐of‐the‐mill foreign convictions, when Congress has

specified that aliens with certain kinds of criminal convictions (including those for
No. 12‐2351 Page 5

controlled‐substance crimes) are inadmissible. See 8 U.S.C. § 1182(a)(2)(A)(i). As long as the

door remains open for a closer look at the foreign conviction in the kind of case we

encountered in Doe, we see no reason why Congress should have been precluded from

closing the doors to the United States for aliens who have failed to comply with the

designated criminal laws of their own countries.

Lui‐Dix also argues that the record of her conviction does not establish that she was

convicted of using a drug that was illegal in the United States, as required to demonstrate

inadmissibility under 8 U.S.C. § 1182(a)(2)(A)(i)(II). But it does. It is true that Lui‐Dix was

convicted of violating a statute that generically prohibits the “use of drugs,” and that this

alone would not establish that the drug used was a controlled substance under U.S. law. See

id. But the BIA is permitted to examine documents related to the foreign conviction to

ascertain whether it was for conduct that made her inadmissible. See Mata‐Guerrero v.

Holder, 627 F.3d 256, 260 (7th Cir. 2010); Ali v. Mukasey, 521 F.3d 737, 742‐43 (7th Cir. 2008).

The translated copy of the Taiwanese court’s judgment, the relevant parts of which we

quoted earlier, makes it clear that the judge concluded that Lui‐Dix used heroin. We

understand that Lui‐Dix believes that this conclusion was not supported by sufficient

evidence, but that is simply another way of collaterally attacking the conviction, and we

have already concluded that she may not do this.

The petition for review is DENIED.