Opinion ID: 2801464
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Heading: as a result of any other charge for which

Text: the defendant was arrested after the commission of the offense for which the sentence was imposed; that has not been credited against another sentence. § 3585(b). The statute does not define “official detention.” When interpreting a statute, “[w]e start, as always, with the language of the statute.” Williams v. Taylor, 529 U.S. 420, 431 (2000). In so doing, “[w]e give the words of a statute their ‘ordinary, contemporary, common meaning,’ absent an indication Congress intended them to bear some different import.” Id. Under the plain text of the sentencing credit statute, when ICE detains an alien for the purpose of securing his presence at a potential criminal prosecution and the alien is indeed criminally prosecuted and sentenced, this period of detention by ICE is “as a result of the offense for which the sentence was imposed.” § 3585(b)(1). The “as a result of” formulation denotes a causal relationship. When ICE detains ZAVALA V. IVES 9 an alien pending a potential criminal prosecution, electing to defer deportation until the conclusion of such criminal proceedings (and often until after service of the criminal sentence), that period of ICE detention is causally attributable to the criminal offense rather than to ICE’s authority to detain an alien pending deportation. Under the plain meaning of the words, detention is the holding of aliens in custody (which the immigration statutes expressly describe as “detention”),4 and ICE is without question an official entity. Pending prosecution means the time during which the alien is detained for the purpose of securing his presence at a potential criminal prosecution, whereas pending deportation means detention for the purpose of removing him from the country. The legislative history of § 3585 does not shed any additional light on whether ICE detention pending criminal prosecution constitutes “official detention,” but similarly it does not contain any indication that Congress intended the statute’s words to have a different import than their plain meaning.5 Thus, we conclude that the relevant inquiry to 4 8 U.S.C. §§ 1226(a)(1); 1231(a)(2). 5 Early versions of the Sentencing Reform Act of 1984, which rewrote and recodified the sentencing credit statute, creating § 3585, included a definition of “official detention” that encompassed “detention by a public servant . . . pending deportation”—a far more expansive definition than the one we adopt. See, e.g., Criminal Code Reform Act of 1981, S. 1630, 97th Cong. § 111 (1981). The entirety of the definitions section, however, was deleted prior to enactment. In United States v. Wilson, the Supreme Court held that the deletion of a reference to the Attorney General during the recodification of the sentencing credit statute effected no change in the statute’s meaning. See 503 U.S. at 336 (concluding the reference “was simply lost in the shuffle”). The Court noted that Congress’s replacement of the term 10 ZAVALA V. IVES determine whether a period of ICE detention constituted “official detention . . . as a result of the offense for which the sentence was imposed” is whether the detainee was being held pending a potential criminal prosecution, rather than pending deportation in the ordinary course—that is, whether the alien’s detention status had changed from pending deportation, which it was at the time he was first detained, to pending prosecution. A number of considerations support our interpretation of the statute as having the meaning its plain words afford it. First, issues of sentencing credit arise only in cases in which the alien has in fact been criminally prosecuted and convicted, so the scope of our holding is necessarily circumscribed. In such cases, we always know that the government elected to pursue criminal prosecution, rather than to attempt to deport the alien forthwith. Otherwise, there would be no criminal sentence to credit. The only question is when the alien’s detention status changed from detention pending deportation to detention pending potential prosecution. Second, federal immigration officers and federal prosecutors work together closely to facilitate criminal prosecutions of aliens. See 8 U.S.C. § 1226(d)(1) (requiring cooperation between the Attorney General and federal, state, and local authorities “with respect to the arrest, conviction, and release of any alien charged with an aggravated felony”); United States Customs and Border Protection Inspector’s “custody” with “official detention” might have constituted a meaningful change, id. at 337, but it subsequently held that the change was a technical one that did not alter the meaning of the statute. See Reno v. Koray, 515 U.S. 50, 59–60 (1995). ZAVALA V. IVES 11 Field Manual § 18.11 (2008) (providing detailed instructions to immigration officers regarding development of a case for criminal prosecution in cooperation with U.S. Attorneys); United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement Detention and Deportation Officer’s Field Manual § 14.8 (2006) (providing instructions on preserving a case for criminal prosecution after reinstatement of removal). It is typically ICE’s referral of a case to a U.S. Attorney that prompts the filing of charges for an immigration-status offense, and it is ICE’s delay of deportation and delivery of the alien to the U.S. Attorney that enables criminal proceedings to occur. Indeed, the record in this case is illustrative of the fact that prosecutions for immigration-status crimes are a collaborative effort by immigration officers and prosecutors: the only evidence supporting the criminal complaint against Zavala filed in the Central District of California was an affidavit by an ICE deportation officer. Given that prosecutions for immigration-status crimes result from cooperative efforts between the two sets of officials, it would be arbitrary to afford sentencing credit when the government elects to hold a defendant in USMS detention while it builds its criminal case but not when the government elects to hold a defendant in ICE detention while it does so. Under the district court’s hardline rule that immigration detention never constitutes “official detention,” two identically situated defendants would serve sentences of differing lengths based solely on the federal government’s election of ICE rather than USMS detention pending potential criminal prosecution. Individuals in immigration detention, unlike those in USMS detention, could be subjected to lengthy periods of detention with no offsetting sentencing credit. Further underscoring the arbitrariness of a blanket rule denying sentencing credit any time aliens are in ICE 12 ZAVALA V. IVES detention is the fact that BOP itself has afforded credit to aliens held in state detention pending federal prosecution, see § 3585(b)(2); U.S. Dept. of Justice, Bureau of Prisons Program Statement No. 5880.28, 1-14A, 1-21 (Feb. 14, 1997); Abpikar v. Lompoc Federal Bureau of Prisons, No. CV 12-00827 MMM, 2012 WL 3777156, at  (C.D. Cal. July 16, 2012), adopting report & recommendation, 2012 WL 3776499 (C.D. Cal. Aug. 30, 2012), and ICE detention often occurs in a state facility. See, e.g., Galan-Paredes v. Hogsten, No. 1:CV-06-1730, 2007 WL 30329,  (M.D. Pa. Jan. 3, 2007) (defendant held in county jail in ICE detention status). In other words, two individuals could receive different sentencing credit and thus serve different length sentences based solely on which agency was nominally in charge of their detention in the same facility.6