Opinion ID: 2681508
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: bivens action against agent mesa

Text: We turn now to the Bivens action against Agent Mesa, which requires an analysis of Agent Mesa’s entitlement to qualified immunity. See, e.g., Wilson v. Layne, 526 U.S. 603, 609 (1999). The doctrine of qualified immunity, which 10 Case: 11-50792 Document: 00512681077 Page: 11 Date Filed: 06/30/2014 No. 11-50792 operates the same under both § 1983 and Bivens, “protects public officials from liability for civil damages insofar as their conduct does not violate clearly established statutory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would have known.” Brown v. Strain, 663 F.3d 245, 249 (5th Cir. 2011) (internal quotation marks omitted). In assessing qualified immunity, we determine “(1) whether the facts that the plaintiff has alleged make out a violation of a constitutional right; and (2) whether the right at issue was clearly established at the time of the defendant’s alleged misconduct.” Ramirez v. Martinez, 716 F.3d 369, 375 (5th Cir. 2013) (quoting Brown, 663 F.3d at 249) (internal quotation marks omitted). “A right is clearly established when ‘it would be clear to a reasonable officer that his conduct was unlawful in the situation he confronted.’” Id. (quoting Jones v. Lowndes Cnty., 678 F.3d 344, 351 (5th Cir. 2012)). Agent Mesa attacks the Appellants’ claims on both prongs of the qualified immunity analysis. His first argument, that there was no constitutional violation, is relatively straightforward: (1) any constitutional injury would have occurred in Mexico; (2) the Constitution does not guarantee rights to foreign nationals injured outside the sovereign territory of the United States; (3) therefore the Appellants cannot state a constitutional violation. This uncomplicated presentation of the Constitution’s extraterritorial application, however, no longer represents the Supreme Court’s view. In Boumediene v. Bush, 553 U.S. 723 (2008), the Supreme Court provided its clearest articulation of the standards governing the application of constitutional principles abroad. The Court addressed whether aliens designated as enemy combatants and detained at Guantanamo Bay had the constitutional privilege of habeas corpus. 553 U.S. at 732. In addressing this question, the Court first discussed its sparse precedent on the Constitution’s geographic scope and found it to undermine “the 11 Case: 11-50792 Document: 00512681077 Page: 12 Date Filed: 06/30/2014 No. 11-50792 Government’s argument that, at least as applied to noncitizens, the Constitution necessarily stops where de jure sovereignty ends.” Id. at 755. For example, the Insular Cases7 addressed “whether the Constitution, by its own force, applies in any territory that is not a State.” Id. at 756. In those cases, the Court held that the Constitution has independent force in newly acquired territories but recognized the inherent difficulties of imposing a new legal system onto these societies. Id. at 757. “These considerations resulted in the doctrine of territorial incorporation, under which the Constitution applies in full in incorporated Territories surely destined for statehood but only in part in unincorporated Territories.” Id. This doctrine illustrated that “the Court took for granted that even in unincorporated Territories the Government of the United States was bound to provide to noncitizen inhabitants ‘guaranties of certain fundamental personal rights declared in the Constitution,’” while still recognizing the “inherent practical difficulties of enforcing all constitutional provisions ‘always and everywhere.’” Id. at 758–59 (quoting Balzac, 258 U.S. at 312). Similar practical considerations were apparent in Reid v. Covert, 354 U.S. 1 (1957). Id. at 759. There, the Boumediene Court explained, six Justices held that civilian spouses of U.S. servicemen stationed abroad could not be tried before military courts for murder and were instead entitled to a trial by jury. See id. at 760–61. The key disagreement between the plurality of four and the two concurring justices was over the continued precedential value of In re Ross, 140 U.S. 453 (1891), in which the Court had held “that under some circumstances Americans abroad have no right to indictment and trial by jury.” Id. at 760. The four-Justice plurality sought to overrule Ross as “insufficiently 7 “The term Insular Cases refers to the series of cases from De Lima v. Bidwell, 182 U.S. 1 (1901), to Balzac v. Porto Rico, 258 U.S. 298 (1922), that established the framework for selective application of the Constitution to ‘unincorporated’ overseas territories.” Gerald L. Neuman, The Extraterritorial Constitution After Boumediene v. Bush, 82 S. Cal. L. Rev. 259, 263 n.22 (2009). 12 Case: 11-50792 Document: 00512681077 Page: 13 Date Filed: 06/30/2014 No. 11-50792 protective of the rights of American citizens,” whereas the two concurring Justices sought simply to distinguish it based on “practical considerations that made jury trial a more feasible option for [the civilian spouses] than it was for the petitioner in Ross.” Id. at 761. The Boumediene Court noted that if practical considerations were irrelevant and citizenship had been the only relevant factor in Reid, “it would have been necessary for the Court to overturn Ross,” something the two concurring justices were unwilling to do. Id. at 761–62. Practical considerations “weighed heavily as well in Johnson v. Eisentrager, 339 U.S. 763 (1950), where the Court addressed whether habeas corpus jurisdiction extended to enemy aliens who had been convicted of violating the laws of war.” Id. at 762. There, the prisoners were detained in Germany, and the Eisentrager Court “stressed the difficulties of ordering the Government to produce the prisoners in a habeas corpus proceeding,” explaining that it “‘would require allocation of shipping space, guarding personnel, billeting and rations’ and would damage the prestige of military commanders at a sensitive time.” Id. at 762 (quoting Eisentrager, 339 U.S. at 779). Though the prisoners were denied access to the writ, the Boumediene Court did not view the decision as having adopted “a formalistic, sovereignty-based test for determining the reach of the Suspension Clause.” Id. Instead, the Court noted that practical considerations were integral to Eisentrager and stated that “[n]othing in Eisentrager says that de jure sovereignty is or has ever been the only relevant consideration in determining the geographic reach of the Constitution or of habeas corpus.” Id. at 764. The Court ultimately determined that all of these cases shared a common thread: “the idea that questions of extraterritoriality turn on objective factors and practical concerns, not formalism.” Id. at 764. Based on these considerations, the Court concluded that at least three factors were relevant in determining the reach of the Suspension Clause: 13 Case: 11-50792 Document: 00512681077 Page: 14 Date Filed: 06/30/2014 No. 11-50792 (1) the citizenship and status of the detainee and the adequacy of the process through which that status determination was made; (2) the nature of the sites where apprehension and then detention took place; and (3) the practical obstacles inherent in resolving the prisoner’s entitlement to the writ. Id. at 766. After analyzing these factors and finding “few practical barriers to the running of the writ,” the Court held that the Suspension Clause “has full effect at Guantanamo Bay.” Id. at 770–71. Thus, Boumediene precludes the categorical test Agent Mesa suggests. Whatever else we may derive from the decision, one principle is clear: de jure sovereignty is not “the only relevant consideration in determining the geographic reach of the Constitution.” Id. at 764. Instead, Boumediene and the cases cited therein indicate that our inquiry involves the selective application of constitutional limitations abroad, requiring us to balance the potential of such application against countervailing government interests.8 In other words, our inquiry is not whether a constitutional principle can be applied abroad; it is whether it should. See Reid v. Covert, 354 U.S. 1, 75 (1957) (Harlan, J., concurring) (“But, for me, the question is which guarantees of the Constitution should apply in view of the particular circumstances, the practical necessities, and the possible alternative which Congress had before it. The question is one of judgment, not of compulsion.” (emphasis added)). The district court concluded that Boumediene had no bearing on this case because it did not specifically address “the Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable searches and seizures.” We disagree. Though Boumediene’s underlying facts concerned the Suspension Clause, its reasoning was not so narrow. The Court surveyed extraterritoriality cases involving myriad 8 See Gerald L. Neuman, Strangers to the Constitution 8 (1996) (associating this approach with the concurring Justices in Reid v. Covert and suggesting that it “boil[s] down to a single right: the right to ‘global due process’”). 14 Case: 11-50792 Document: 00512681077 Page: 15 Date Filed: 06/30/2014 No. 11-50792 constitutional rights and spoke to the extraterritorial application of the Constitution, not simply the Suspension Clause. See Boumediene, 553 U.S. at 764 (“Nothing in Eisentrager says that de jure sovereignty is or has ever been the only relevant consideration in determining the geographic reach of the Constitution or of habeas corpus.” (emphasis added)); id. (“[Q]uestions of extraterritoriality turn on objective factors and practical concerns, not formalism.”). Our extraterritoriality analysis must therefore track Boumediene’s. Specifically, three “objective factors and practical concerns” are relevant to our extraterritoriality determination: (1) the citizenship and status of the claimant, (2) the nature of the location where the constitutional violation occurred, and (3) the practical obstacles inherent in enforcing the claimed right. Cf. id. at 766–71. The relevant practical obstacles include the consequences for U.S. actions abroad, the substantive rules that would govern the claim, and the likelihood that a favorable ruling would lead to friction with another country’s government. See id.; Verdugo–Urquidez, 494 U.S. at 273–74; id. at 278 (Kennedy, J., concurring). These factors are not exhaustive, as the relevant considerations may change with the facts of an individual case, but they do provide a baseline for addressing questions of extraterritoriality. The above factors do not obviate our reliance on the text of the Constitution itself. Not all constitutional provisions will have equal extraterritorial application, if any. Some contain geographical references, but others do not. Compare U.S. Const. amend. XIII (“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude[] . . . shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”), with U.S. Const. amend. V (“No person shall be . . . deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law . . . .”). In Boumediene, the “importance of the habeas right itself was an unlisted factor that . . . argued in favor of broader reach.” Neuman, The Extraterritorial 15 Case: 11-50792 Document: 00512681077 Page: 16 Date Filed: 06/30/2014 No. 11-50792 Constitution, supra, at 287. Accordingly, as with any case of constitutional interpretation, extraterritoriality determinations require an analysis of the operation, text, and history of the specific constitutional provision involved. With these principles in mind, we analyze whether the Constitution may be held to apply to the Appellants’ claims, beginning with those asserted under the Fourth Amendment.