Opinion ID: 3013221
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: United States v. Hyde

Text: Although largely ignored by the parties and the District Court, our decision in United States v. Hyde, 37 F.3d 116 (3d Cir. 1994), squarely supports the constitutionality of the Checkpoint under Fourth Amendment analysis. In Hyde, we addressed “whether an individual leaving the Virgin Islands for one of the fifty states may be subjected to a routine customs search prior to departure in the absence of any degree of suspicion that the individual engaged in wrongdoing.” Id. at 118. As in Martinez-Fuerte, we emphasized that the constitutionality of the search depended on the results of “balancing the ‘intrusion on the individual’s Fourth Amendment interests’ [against] the degree to which routine customs searches ‘promot[e] 24 legitimate governmental interests.’ ” Hyde, 37 F.3d at 122. We concluded that the Government’s interest in conducting warrantless searches without probable cause outweighed the individual’s interest in not being subject to the intrusion on Fourth Amendment interests. Id. at 122. The District Court read our analysis in Hyde as applying strictly to customs searches. According to the Court, Hyde is “factually inapposite . . . because the Congress has always included the Virgin Islands within the United States for immigration purposes, but not for customs purposes . . . . Whatever else it may endorse, Hyde does not stand for the proposition that there is an ‘internal’ border between the Virgin Islands and the continental United States for immigration purposes.” Pollard, 209 F. Supp. 2d at 545. Inasmuch as the District Court believed that Hyde does not support the constitutionality of the Checkpoint, we disagree. While Hyde focused on customs searches, its reasoning certainly applies to the immigration questioning conducted at the Checkpoint. In applying the balancing test in Hyde, we noted that “not all territory over which a sovereign exercises sovereignty has the same legal status, and borders between ‘incorporated’ and ‘unincorporated’ territory[, such as the Virgin Islands,] of a sovereign have many of the characteristics of international borders.” 37 F.3d at 120. Thus, we concluded that Congress’s “broad power to regulate commerce between the United States and its unincorporated territories,” id. at 122, enabled it to constitutionally create a border for customs purposes between the Virgin Islands and the United States. Id. We focused on what we perceived to be the interest of the Government in warrantless searches at the Airport and found that interest “to be little different from its interest in such searches at its international borders.” Id. After we determined that the Government has a significant interest in customs searches, we noted that the reasonable expectation of individual privacy of the defendants in Hyde was not “materially greater than the reasonable privacy expectations of travelers at an international border.” Id. We also noted that customs searches had been conducted consistently on the Islands 25 since the U.S. acquired them, and that the public was sufficiently aware of the distinctive status of the Islands “to alert such travelers to the possibility of border inquiries not experienced at state lines.” Id. Although there are differences between customs interests and immigration interests, we see no reason why the balancing test would yield different results when applied to the Checkpoint. While the power of Congress used in Hyde was the power to regulate commerce, here, the power at issue is the power to regulate immigration — which is at least equally as compelling. Applying the balancing test, the Government clearly has as great an interest in interdicting aliens as it does in regulating customs. The intrusion on an individual’s interests that results from the questioning at the Checkpoint likewise does not seem to exceed the intrusion that results from a customs inspection. Moreover, the expectation of privacy is equally as low. As a result, Hyde also supports the constitutionality of the Checkpoint.