[DO NOT PUBLISH]

In the

United States Court of Appeals

For the Eleventh Circuit

____________________

No. 20-13123

Non-Argument Calendar

____________________

DONOVAN G. DAVIS, JR., 

Plaintiff-Appellant,

versus

ROY DOTSON, JR., 

individually,

KARA WICK, 

individually,

ANDREW BAZEMORE,

individually, 

Defendants-Appellees.

USCA11 Case: 20-13123 Date Filed: 11/17/2021 Page: 1 of 6
2 Opinion of the Court 20-13123

____________________

Appeal from the United States District Court

for the Middle District of Florida

D.C. Docket No. 8:19-cv-02235-CEH-TGW

____________________

Before WILSON, GRANT, and ANDERSON, Circuit Judges.

PER CURIAM:

Donovan Davis, Jr., appeals the dismissal of his pro se civil 

complaint, filed pursuant to Bivens v. Six Unknown Narcotic 

Agents, 403 U.S. 388 (1971), against United States Secret Service 

agents Andrew Bazemore and Roy Dotson, Jr., and Assistant 

United States Attorney Kara Wick. We conclude that Davis failed 

to state a Bivens claim against the defendants, and we therefore affirm.

I. 

In his complaint, Davis alleged that Bazemore and Dotson 

destroyed his personal property, after receiving authorization from 

Wick, by erasing electronic data from a hard drive he owned that 

had been seized pursuant to a grand jury subpoena and stored in a 

Secret Service vault. Davis alleged that by intentionally and 

wrongfully destroying the data, the defendants violated his Fifth 

Amendment rights and their constitutional duty of care for his 

property. 

USCA11 Case: 20-13123 Date Filed: 11/17/2021 Page: 2 of 6
20-13123 Opinion of the Court 3

The defendants moved to dismiss Davis’s complaint for failure to state a claim. The district court granted their motions and 

dismissed the complaint, explaining that the Supreme Court has 

not authorized an implied cause of action under Bivens for Fifth 

Amendment property-damage claims or a constitutional “duty of 

care” for property, and expanding Bivens to encompass Davis’s 

claims was not warranted because Davis had alternate remedies. 

Davis appealed.

II. 

We review the district court’s grant of a motion to dismiss 

for failure to state a claim de novo, “accepting the allegations in the 

complaint as true and construing them in the light most favorable 

to the plaintiff.” Hill v. White, 321 F.3d 1334, 1335 (11th Cir. 2003). 

In Bivens, the Supreme Court inferred a private cause of action for damages against federal officersfor alleged violations of the 

plaintiff’s Fourth Amendment rights. Bivens, 403 U.S. at 397. The 

Court later extended the implied remedy it recognized in Bivens to 

two additional contexts: a sex discrimination claim under the Fifth 

Amendment Due Process Clause and an Eighth Amendment claim 

alleging cruel and unusual punishment. See Davis v. Passman, 442 

U.S. 228 (1979); Carlson v. Green, 446 U.S. 14 (1980). 

Since 1980, however, the Supreme Court has made clear 

that further expansion of Bivens is “disfavored.” Ziglar v. Abbasi, 

137 S. Ct. 1843, 1857 (2017) (quoting Ashcroft v. Iqbal, 556 U.S. 662, 

675 (2009)). It has therefore “consistently refused to extend Bivens

USCA11 Case: 20-13123 Date Filed: 11/17/2021 Page: 3 of 6
4 Opinion of the Court 20-13123

to any new context or new category of defendants.” Id. (quoting 

Corr. Servs. Corp. v. Malesko, 534 U.S. 61, 68 (2001)). 

When evaluating a plaintiff’s proposed Bivens claim, we engage in a two-step inquiry. Hernandez v. Mesa, 140 S. Ct. 735, 743

(2020). First, we ask whether the claim arises in a new context or 

involves a new category of defendants. Id. That is the case here—

Davis concedes, and we agree, that his Fifth Amendment property 

claims are “different in a meaningful way from previous Bivens

cases decided by” the Supreme Court. Id. (quoting Abbasi, 137 S.

Ct. at 1859).

If the plaintiff seeks to bring a Bivens claim in a new context, 

we proceed to the second step and consider whether any “special 

factors” exist that “counse[l] hesitation” about creating a new

Bivens cause of action for plaintiff’s claim. Id. (alteration in the

original). At this stage of the inquiry, “separation-of-powers principles are or should be central to the analysis.” Abbasi, 137 S. Ct. 

at 1857. If “there are sound reasons to think Congress might doubt 

the efficacy or necessity of a damages remedy as part of the system 

for enforcing the law and correcting a wrong, the courts must refrain from creating the remedy in order to respect the role of Congress in determining the nature and extent of federal-court jurisdiction under Article III.” Id. at 1858. And in “a related way, if there 

is an alternative remedial structure present in a certain case, that 

alone may limit the power of the Judiciary to infer a new Bivens

cause of action.” Id.; see Malesko, 534 U.S. at 70 (noting that the 

Court has implied a Bivens action only “to provide an otherwise 

USCA11 Case: 20-13123 Date Filed: 11/17/2021 Page: 4 of 6
20-13123 Opinion of the Court 5

nonexistent cause of action” or where the plaintiff “lacked any alternative remedy for harms caused by an individual officer’s unconstitutional conduct” (emphasis in the original)).

Here, Congress has provided at least one alternative means 

for Davis to seek compensation for the destruction of his property: 

by statute, the Attorney General may settle claims up to $50,000 

for loss of private property caused by Justice Department investigative or law enforcement employees acting within the scope of 

their employment. 31 U.S.C. § 3724. The fact that a settlement 

under the statute may not fully compensate Davis for his lost 

data—which he says was worth around $100,000—does not justify 

the expansion of Bivens to a new context. See Schweiker v. 

Chilicky, 487 U.S. 412, 425–29 (1988) (refusing to extend Bivens to 

provide damages remedy for denial of Social Security benefits even 

though remedies available under the Social Security Act did not 

provide “complete relief”). 

On appeal, Davis argues that he cannot pursue a settlement 

with the Attorney General because the government has not certified that the defendants were acting within the scope of their employment when they destroyed his property. This argument is misplaced. Davis cites 28 U.S.C. § 2679(d), which provides for the substitution of the United States as defendant in a Federal Tort Claims 

Act suit if the Attorney General certifies that the defendant federal 

employee was acting within the scope of his employment at the 

time of the incident from which the claim arose. Section 2679(d) 

does not apply to claims for settlement by the Attorney General 

USCA11 Case: 20-13123 Date Filed: 11/17/2021 Page: 5 of 6
6 Opinion of the Court 20-13123

under 31 U.S.C. § 3724, and the lack of certification under § 2679(d) 

does not preclude Davis from pursuing a settlement for the destruction of his property if he wishes to do so.

It is also significant that while Congress has created one avenue for claimants to recover for the loss or destruction of property 

by federal law enforcement officers, it has explicitly closed another

by barring claims like Davis’s under the Federal Tort Claims Act. 

28 U.S.C. § 2680(c) (FTCA waiver of sovereign immunity does not 

apply to claims against law enforcement officers “arising in respect 

of” the “detention” of property); Ali v. Fed. Bureau of Prisons, 552 

U.S. 214, 216, 227–28 (2008) (section 2680(c) bars FTCA claims 

against law enforcement officers for the loss of property). This existing legislation is enough to convince us that extending Bivens to 

create an additional damages remedy for Davis’s claims is neither 

necessary nor appropriate.

III. 

We conclude that Davis failed to state a Bivens claim against 

the defendants because the Supreme Court has not previously approved a cause of action under Bivens for property claims, and 

“there are sound reasons to think Congress might doubt the efficacy or necessity of a damages remedy” in this context. Abbasi, 137 

S. Ct. at 1858. We therefore affirm the district court’s dismissal of 

Davis’s complaint for failure to state a claim. 

AFFIRMED. 

USCA11 Case: 20-13123 Date Filed: 11/17/2021 Page: 6 of 6