Opinion ID: 3034983
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Official Restraint

Text: At trial, the government did not attempt to prove that the defendant intended to be free of official restraint, but instead argued that “official restraint” could only be restraint by officials of the Department of Homeland Security (“DHS”). Thus, if the defendant had the specific intent to be taken to jail, he satisfied the statute’s requirement of having the intent to be free from official restraint. The district court agreed, and instructed the jury, “An alien enters or reenters the United States when they [sic] actually cross the border and are free to go about, that is, go at large or at will within the United States. If the alien is restrained by the agents or barriers of the Department of Homeland Security at the border, they [sic] are not yet free to go about or at large within the United States.” (emphasis added). [3] On appeal, all parties now agree that contrary to the jury instructions and repeated statements of the court and prosecution, official restraint — a legal concept that is “interpreted broadly” in our circuit, Hernandez-Herrera, 273 F.3d at 1219 (citing Ruiz-Lopez, 234 F.3d at 448) — encompasses restraint by any government official, not just officials of DHS. See, e.g., United States v. Oscar, 496 F.2d 492, 493 (9th Cir. 1974) (holding that official restraint encompasses restraint by customs officials); cf. United States v. Zavala-Mendez, 411 F.3d 1116, 1120 n. 19 (9th Cir. 2005) (“Many people would rather be arrested and put in a warm jail than leave the safety of ‘official restraint’ . . . .”). Our circuit precedent clearly holds that an alien who is on United States soil, but who is “deprived of [his] liberty and prevented from going at large within the United States,” remains under official restraint and therefore has not entered the country for the purposes of § 1326. Hernandez-Herrera, 273 F.3d at 1218 (quoting Pacheco-Medina, 212 F.3d at 1163-64 (quoting Ex parte Chow Chok, 161 F. 627, 628-29 (N.D.N.Y. 1908), aff’d 163 F. 1021 (2d Cir. 1908))); see also id. at 1219 (stating that aliens who “lack[ ] the freedom to go at large and mix with UNITED STATES v. LOMBERA-VALDOVINOS 15523 the population” remain under official restraint) (quoting RuizLopez, 234 F.3d at 448) (emphasis added). This understanding of the legal status of certain aliens in our country stretches back many decades. In Kaplan v. Tod, 267 U.S. 228, 229 (1925), an alien thirteen-year-old was brought to Ellis Island, and then “handed over to the Hebrew Sheltering and Immigrant Aid Society,” which allowed her to live with her father. Writing for the Court, Justice Holmes concluded that “[w]hen her prison bounds were enlarged by committing her to the custody of the Hebrew Society, the nature of her stay within the territory was not changed. She was still in theory of law at the boundary line and had gained no foothold in the United States.” Id. at 229-30.2 [4] With this proper understanding of the scope of official restraint in mind, it is clear that an alien who is under official restraint from the moment of crossing, and who never intended to avoid or change that status, cannot therefore have the necessary intent to be guilty of attempted illegal reentry. This precisely describes the defendant’s actions and intent here — as the prosecution itself argued to the jury, but on the faulty premise that intent to go to jail was intent to be free of official restraint. 2 The dissent proposes a much narrower interpretation of “official restraint,” based on practical and policy considerations. However, we are required to apply our circuit’s rule that if an alien is “deprived of [his] liberty and prevented from going at large within the United States,” he is not free from official restraint. Hernandez-Herrera, 273 F.3d at 1218 (citations omitted). For the purposes of determining intent, the defendant here was in much the same situation as the orphan in Kaplan — he sought to have his “prison bounds . . . enlarged” beyond Agent Avila’s custody to the custody of some other United States jailer. Kaplan, 267 U.S. at 230. Surely the dissent does not impute to the defendant a grasp of its theory of how the doctrine of official restraint operates. 15524 UNITED STATES v. LOMBERA-VALDOVINOS