Opinion ID: 2815874
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Whether Padilla abrogates Kwan

Text: In Kwan, we held that affirmatively misleading a client regarding the immigration consequences of a conviction 1 The government made this argument before the district court, but has not pursued it on appeal. Although the government has thus waived this argument, Smith v. Marsh, 194 F.3d 1045, 1052 (9th Cir. 1999), we find it a necessary starting point for our analysis. UNITED STATES V. CHAN 7 could constitute the basis for an IAC claim. 407 F.3d at 1015. We noted that our holding was notwithstanding our earlier-espoused rule that “an attorney’s failure to advise a client of the immigration consequences of a conviction, without more, does not constitute ineffective assistance of counsel.” Id. (citing United States v. Fry, 322 F.3d 1198, 1200 (9th Cir. 2003), abrogated by Padilla, 559 U.S. 356). Five years after Kwan, the Supreme Court changed the landscape of IAC claims and held that, in order to satisfy the Sixth Amendment, defense counsel “must inform her client whether his plea carries a risk of deportation.” Padilla, 559 U.S. at 374. This holding abrogated the existing rule in all ten courts of appeals that had reached this issue—including ours, Fry, 322 F.3d 1198—as the courts of appeals had uniformly concluded that the mere failure to advise regarding the possibility of deportation could not establish an IAC claim. Chaidez, 133 S. Ct. at 1109 & n.7. Padilla was simultaneously broader and narrower than our decision in Kwan: broader in that Padilla reached affirmative misrepresentations and failure to advise, but narrower in that Padilla concerned only deportation whereas Kwan considered all “immigration consequences.” Compare Padilla, 559 U.S. at 364–66, 369–74, with Kwan, 407 F.3d at 1015–17. Further, the crux of Padilla’s holding was to reject the direct/collateral consequence distinction in the context of deportation to “conclude that advice regarding deportation is not categorically removed from the ambit of the Sixth Amendment right to counsel.” 559 U.S. at 366. Kwan, though, concerned itself more with the fact that an attorney misadvised his client about a matter material to the client’s decision to enter into a plea agreement. See 407 F.3d at 1016 (“[C]ounsel made an affirmative representation to Kwan that 8 UNITED STATES V. CHAN he had knowledge and experience regarding the immigration consequences of criminal convictions; as a result, counsel had a professional responsibility to [correctly] inform himself and his client . . . .”). Thus, while Padilla clearly abrogated Kwan to the extent that Kwan reaffirmed the rule in Fry, see Kwan, 407 F.3d at 1015, Kwan’s holding that affirmative misrepresentations by counsel regarding immigration consequences constitutes deficient performance under Strickland v. Washington, 466 U.S. 668 (1984), clearly survives Padilla.