Opinion ID: 3032235
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: facts

Text: Zavala-Mendez was a passenger in a car that crossed into Alaska on the Alaska Highway from the Yukon Territory on a January night. He had no right to enter the United States, because he had been deported and the Attorney General had not given him permission to reenter.1 At the border station Zavala-Mendez lied and said he had a green card. But he gave his true name, and it came up on the border station computer showing that he had been deported. He was therefore detained and driven to Anchorage, 430 miles away, where his fingerprints could be scanned and compared to the fingerprints in his alien file. The prints matched. Zavala-Mendez was convicted of being “found in” the United States after having previously been deported.2 He was not indicted for attempting to enter the United States.3 His only defense is legal, that he could not be “found in” the United States when all he did after crossing the border was to go straight to the border station and present himself for entry. Like all American border stations, the Alaskan facility is inside the United States, so by the time Zavala-Mendez got there, he was already across the survey line that delineates one country from the other. It was dark, and traffic is light on the Alaska Highway in January. There are no lights along the road except at the border, so the immigration inspectors can see the headlights of cars approaching from miles away, and drivers and passengers can likewise see the border from miles away. Zavala-Mendez’s car was the first vehicle at the border in four or five hours. The American border station facility is up a hill, a quarter or half mile from the actual border, because permafrost pre- 1 See 8 U.S.C. §§ 1326(a) and (b)(2). 2 8 U.S.C. § 1326(a). 3 See id. UNITED STATES v. ZAVALA-MENDEZ 7121 vented building the facility closer to the border. The actual border is at the start of the hill. It takes well under a minute to drive at the speed limit from the treaty line between Canada and the United States — marked by a concrete obelisk — to the American border facility where federal personnel are sheltered from the extreme cold. A car is out of sight at the base of the hill — where the surveyed border and obelisk are — for perhaps a half second as it approaches the station, though, of course, the light from the headlights would remain visible in the dark. A driver can tell when he crosses the border because at the surveyed border there are American and Canadian flags that are lit up all night, a “Welcome To Alaska” sign, and a tourist pullout next to the survey obelisk. The trees are also clear cut, like a power line cut, along the border. Thus, any driver or passenger paying attention would know that he was already across the border when he got to the border station. As Zavala-Mendez’s car approached, an inspector looked, as usual, through binoculars at the license plate, so that the licence plate number could be typed into the computer. Mud obscured the number. That got the inspector out of the station, because water is not a liquid in that part of Alaska in January and the highway does not throw up mud in winter. When the car arrived at the station, one inspector checked the license plate, and the other asked the driver for identifications. The driver, the driver’s mother, and Zavala-Mendez all gave their driver’s licenses. The computer flagged Zavala-Mendez, so he was taken into custody. The district court denied Zavala-Mendez’s motion for a judgment of acquittal,4 he was convicted at jury trial, and he appeals. He raises a question as to jury instructions, but we do not reach it because we conclude that he was entitled to have his motion granted. 4 See Fed. R. Crim. Proc. 29. 7122 UNITED STATES v. ZAVALA-MENDEZ