Opinion ID: 202136
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Consent to Re-enter

Text: Garcia next argues the evidence was insufficient to support the jury's conclusion that he lacked the Attorney General's consent to re-enter the country. In reviewing such a challenge, we consider the record evidence (and any reasonable inferences therefrom) as a whole and in the light most favorable to the prosecution, asking whether the evidence would have permitted a rational jury to find the defendants guilty of the crime charged beyond a reasonable doubt. United States v. Downs-Moses, 329 F.3d 253, 261 (1st Cir. 2003). '[T]he evidence may be entirely circumstantial, and need not exclude every hypothesis of innocence . . . .' United States v. Meléndez-Torres, 420 F.3d 45, 49 (1st Cir. 2005) (internal quotation marks omitted) (quoting United States v. Scantleberry-Frank, 158 F.3d 612, 616 (1st Cir. 1998)). To convict Garcia of violating 8 U.S.C. § 1326(a), the jury must have found that the government proved beyond a reasonable doubt that Garcia was an alien, that he had been deported, that he -22- entered or attempted to enter or was later found in the United States, and that he did so without the express consent of the Attorney General for such entry. Id. (citing Scantleberry-Frank, 158 F.3d at 616); see 8 U.S.C. § 1326(a). At trial, the government presented evidence as to the express consent prong -- specifically, a Certificate of Nonexistence of Record stating that no such consent appeared in the INS A-File10 on Dario DeLeon. Garcia argues that since the INS kept a separate A-File on Rafael Garcia, the jury could not convict absent evidence that no indication of consent appeared in the Rafael Garcia file either. Since the government produced no such evidence, he says, it failed to carry its burden. This argument is without merit. Garcia's own lies led to his deportation under the name DeLeon. If he had requested permission to re-enter after deportation, he would have had to do so as DeLeon (otherwise the request would have made no sense to the immigration authorities) and any such permission logically would be in the DeLeon file. Further, as the district court found, the evidence supports the conclusion that Garcia schemed to be deported under a false name so he could immediately re-enter using his real identity. A jury could reasonably infer that Garcia never would have requested permission (under any name) to re-enter, since such 10 An INS A-File records every contact an alien has with the immigration service. Meléndez-Torres, 420 F.3d at 47. -23- a request would have alerted the INS to his deception. In short, the evidence is more than sufficient to sustain the jury verdict. Garcia falls back to an argument that he in fact had express permission to re-enter the country because he did so using his green card, which was issued by the Attorney General and which he says constitutes the requisite permission. As the district court said: Under defendant's interpretation of the statute, he can lie about his identity . . . and then re-enter with impunity using a green card under his real name. This would obviously frustrate the statutory purpose of keeping previously-deported aliens from reentering the country without the Attorney General's 'express' prior permission. Garcia had just been deported, regardless of what name he was using at the time, and he therefore needed the Attorney General's contemporaneous permission before he could legally re-enter. 8 U.S.C. § 1326(a). If Garcia had been deported under his real name, his green card likely would have been revoked, and in any event obviously would not constitute such permission.11 He can gain no advantage from having deceived the INS about his identity. 11 Garcia cites a case, United States v. Idowu, 105 F.3d 728 (D.C. Cir. 1997), for the proposition that even an invalid green card is enough to constitute Attorney General consent. The Idowu court held no such thing. It said only that the defendant alien might not have needed consent at all because more than five years had passed since his deportation; because the crucial question involved passage of time, the court noted that the validity or invalidity of his arrival documents was irrelevant to its analysis. Id. at 731. -24-