Court Opinion

ID: 9486694
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 11:56:30.710306+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:51:52.551356
License: Public Domain

CHOY, Circuit Judge,
dissenting in part:
The majority rejects the INS’ claim that Gonzalez failed to establish a prima facie violation of the Fourth Amendment under United States v. Brignoni-Ponce, 422 U.S. 873, 884, 95 S.Ct. 2574, 2581, 45 L.Ed.2d 607 (1975), and finds that the BIA attached undue weight to inconclusive suspicional factors cited by the INS as the “articulable facts” supporting the Border Patrol’s stop of Gonzalez’ vehicle. With these portions of the majority’s opinion I concur. However, because I believe this case falls squarely within the rule, rather than any untested exception, stated in INS v. Lopez-Mendoza, 468 U.S. 1032, 104 S.Ct. 3479, 82 L.Ed.2d 778 (1984), I do not join part 3 of the majority opinion concluding that the exclusionary rule bars admission of Gonzalez’ inculpatory 1-213 Form at his deportation hearing. On this point I would affirm the BIA’s contrary ruling.
In Lopez-Mendoza the Court rejected extension of the exclusionary rule to civil deportation hearings after extensive cost-benefit analysis. Id. at 1041-1050, 104 S.Ct. at 3484-89. In view of the “staggering dimension of the problem that the INS confronts,” *1453id. at 1049, 104 S.Ct. at 3488, the Court concluded that the marginal deterrence of Fourth Amendment violations gained would not justify the social costs imposed, including hampering administrative efficiency, sacrificing probative evidence and burdening the enforcement of immigration laws. Nonetheless, in dictum on which the majority relies, a plurality of the Court cautioned that it was not dealing with “egregious violations of the Fourth Amendment ... that might transgress notions of fundamental fairness and undermine the probative value of the evidence.” Id. at 1050-51, 104 S.Ct. at 3489.
In my view, neither the facts nor the factors considered by the Court in Lopez-Mendoza are dispositively different from those at issue in the case before us. At issue in the Court’s utilitarian calculus no less than in the case at bar was “the exclusion of credible evidence gathered in connection with peaceful arrests by INS officers.” Id. at 1051, 104 S.Ct. at 3489. One of the two respondents in Lopez-Mendoza was arrested in a warrant-less INS factory sweep under circumstances of pandemonium in which the interrogating officers could not recall the details of individual interrogations, including which workers they personally questioned and the specific ground for detaining the respondent beyond his “evasive” demeanor. Id. at 1037, 104 S.Ct. at 3482. Here, to an equal degree and in an essentially similar fashion, a roving patrol lacking either a warrant or a sufficient quantum of individualized suspicion singled out Gonzalez for peaceful questioning as to his alienage on the basis of a relevant but insufficient factor, his apparent ethnicity. See Brignoni-Ponce, 422 U.S. at 884, 95 S.Ct. at 2581. Here, as in Lopez-Mendoza, the officers recited in support of their actions familiar factors, apart from Hispanic appearance, that we dismissed as disingenuous or ambiguous and therefore incapable of insulating their conduct from the prohibition against solely race-based investigatory stops explicated in Brignoni-Ponce. Lopez-Mendoza v. INS, 705 F.2d 1059, 1063 (9th Cir.1983), rev’d on other grounds, Lopez-Mendoza, 468 U.S. 1032, 104 S.Ct. 3479.
Moreover, in the decade since the Court overruled our application of the exclusionary rule to deportation hearings in Lopez-Mendoza, Congress has on a number of occasions underscored the public policy against the presence and employment of unregistered aliens in the country, a consideration at center stage of the “backdrop” to the Court’s cost-benefit analysis. See Maka v. INS, 904 F.2d 1351, 1358 (9th Cir.1990) (enactment of Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, with its severe penalties for hiring undocumented aliens, “radically changed immigration law”). With the backlog of immigration cases and the “staggering dimensions” of the INS’ enforcement task continuing unabated, unignorable advantages remain to keeping deportation proceedings streamlined and unencumbered by the exclusionary rule’s intricate jurisprudence in relatively run-of-the-mill cases such as this.
The majority closely analyzes portions of the Lopez-Mendoza dictum to infer that the Court inadvertently drafted in the conjunctive the fundamental fairness and probative value prongs of the egregiousness test. Having decoupled the two prongs, the majority reasonably sets out to expand the category of egregious violations beyond acts of physical brutality. Not clearly proceeding under the rubric of either prong, my colleagues then equate egregiousness with bad faith transgressions of the Fourth Amendment whose fruits would impermissibly compromise judicial integrity upon their entry into the courtroom.
To be sure, dictum in Adamson v. Commissioner, 745 F.2d 541, 545-46 (9th Cir.1984), supports this result. Given the distinct institutional setting in Adamson, a tax ease, and our holding that the exclusionary rule was inapplicable in that ease, I submit that this dictum lends little support to the majority’s extension of the exclusionary rule. Of considerably greater precedential value is our later holding in Benitez-Mendez v. INS, 760 F.2d 907, 909 (9th Cir.1985), that under Lopez-Mendoza the exclusionary rule does not bar admission in a deportation hearing of an illegally obtained Form 1-213 stemming from a peaceful arrest, notwithstanding the Border Patrol’s inability to “articulate objective facts providing a reasonable suspicion that [the petitioner] was an alien illegally in *1454this country.” Given the essentially similar facts involved here and in Benitez-Mendez, I believe our holding in that case further precludes the result reached by the majority in part 3 of the opinion.1
In addition, insofar as judicial integrity persists as a factor to be weighed in support of the exclusionary rule generally, Justice Marshall’s eloquent dissent in Lopez-Mendoza, 468 U.S. at 1060-61, 104 S.Ct. at 3494-95, gave the Court full opportunity to reflect on this consideration. That Justice O’Connor nonetheless omitted judicial integrity from her solely deterrence-oriented opinion would therefore appear to be less a matter of oversight than a deliberate decision to exclude that consideration from the analysis governing the specific context before us.
On the other hand, I concede that Lopez-Mendoza invites creative interpretation of the sort in which my colleagues thoughtfully engage, insofar as the “egregious violation” dictum contains a citation to a case, Rochin v. California, 342 U.S. 165, 72 S.Ct. 205, 96 L.Ed. 183 (1952), not fully in harmony with a literal reading of the plurality’s conjunctive, two-pronged caveat.. But I attach greater weight than does the majority to Justice O’Connor’s phrasing of the Court’s holding that “evidence gathered in connection with peaceful arrests ... need not be suppressed in an INS civil deportation hearing.” Lopez-Mendoza, 468 U.S. at 1051, 104 S.Ct. at 3489 (emphasis added). Absent resort to reliable but shocking methods of obtaining evidence represented by the emetic solution administered in Rochin, this formulation suggests that the exclusionary rule will not apply to civil deportation hearings where the INS refrains from unpeaceable (but not necessarily brutal) tactics which commonly undermine both fundamental fairness and the probative value of the evidence seized thereby. See Cervantes-Cuevas v. INS, 797 F.2d 707, 711 (9th Cir.1985) (statements following illegal alien’s unlawful detention are admissible under Lopez-Mendoza absent “proof casting doubt on the probative value of voluntary statements”).
I share my colleagues’ aim of deterring INS stops impermissibly premised on race alone and I am sympathetic with their endeavor to shield judicial integrity from the taint of ostensible collusion in race-based INS round-ups. However, in deeming egregious the INS’ relatively uneventful detention of Gonzalez, the majority pursues a path I do not believe we are free to follow after Lopez-Mendoza, Cervantes-Cuevas and Ben-itez-Mendez. With unimpeachable intentions but untenable results, my colleagues seek to deter INS misconduct by expanding the egregiousness exception in cases involving objective bad faith by the INS. Yet they inflate this limitation to such an extent that even the INS’ uncondoned but comparatively pedestrian violations in Lopez-Mendoza would merit suppression of derivative evidence the Court held was admissible.
Rather than elevate the egregiousness exception on so thin and reversible a need into a virtual rule almost categorically contrary to the holding in Lopez-Mendoza, or complicate - the limitation with objective inquiries into INS officers’ good or bad faith, we would better serve the integrity of the judiciary and preserve the body of Fourth Amendment laws currently shielding undocumented aliens by expanding injunctive relief aimed at abuses of this sort, a method of control encouraged by the Court in Lopez-Mendoza and approved by us in a more limited geographical context in Nicacio v. INS, 768 F.2d 1133, 1140 (9th Cir.1985). In Nicacio we upheld a district court injunction in Washington state enjoining wholesale, warrantless investigatory stops of the Hispanic community and im*1455posing on the INS the requirement that its officers record all such stops. By advancing down this path in lieu of the majority’s, we would establish a fuller, better documented record on which to revisit the alternative limitation on the holding in Lopez-Mendoza to be triggered “if there developed good reason to believe that Fourth Amendment violations by INS officers were widespread.” 468 U.S. at 1050, 104 S.Ct. at 3489 (citation omitted).
I therefore respectfully dissent from part 3 of the majority opinion.

. In my view the majority too readily dismisses Benitez-Mendez as controlling authority on the basis that the petitioner did not explicitly allege a race-based stop or egregious violation of the Fourth Amendment. Ante at 1451, n. 9. I am not persuaded that on rehearing the court focused, or was required to- focus, exclusively on the rule in Lopez-Mendoza while ignoring potential exceptions, merely because Benitez-Mendez failed (assuming that he had the opportunity to rephrase his argument in light of the intervening case) to incant the qualifier “egregious”. To the contrary, given the careful consideration in Beni-tez-Mendez of the voluntariness of the petitioner's responses and the absence of physical force or intimidation, the court more plausibly concluded that the peaceful nature of the unlawful arrest rendered the egregiousness exception inapplicable, notwithstanding the apparent but constitutionally inadequate basis for the stop.