Court Opinion

ID: 9496675
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 16:32:09.207212+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:57:43.101924
License: Public Domain

BATCHELDER, Circuit Judge,
dissenting.
I respectfully dissent. Although, like the majority, I am sympathetic to Ijeoma Ejelonu’s plight, I cannot join with the Court’s use of an extraordinary writ that was never sought by Ejelonu nor briefed by any of the parties in this case. It is not proper for this Court to construe Ejelonu’s pleading as a request for a writ of audita querela, and had she in fact requested such relief, it would not be proper for this Court to grant it.
*553I.
The facts of this case are indeed troubling. As the majority points out, had the INS acted in a timely fashion, Ejelonu would be a citizen and would not be de-portable regardless of her having committed these offenses. And deporting Ejelo-nu because she committed these offenses seems unduly harsh — she has no known relatives remaining in Nigeria, and has not lived there herself since she was a child. Unlike the majority, however, I do not assume that the information upon which the deportation proceedings are based necessarily was obtained in violation of a court order or by any nefarious means. M.C.L. § 762.14(4) provides that the records in a proceeding under the Holmes Youthful Trainee Act (“HYTA”), M.C.L. §§ 762.11-.15, “shall be closed to public inspection, but shall be open to the courts of this state, the department of corrections, the department of social services, and law enforcement personnel for use only in the performance of their duties.” The Michigan court specifically ordered that, pursuant to M.C.L. § 769.16a, the court clerk was to send to the Michigan State Police Central Records Division, for purposes of creating a criminal history record, a copy of the order assigning Ejelonu to Youthful Trainee Status. Ejelonu admits that her application for citizenship remained pending before the INS, and 8 U.S.C. § 1446 requires that before a person may be naturalized, the Service or the Attorney General “shall conduct a personal investigation of the person.” Hence, it is certainly not unlikely that the INS acquired the information entirely within the bounds of the court’s order and the Michigan law. And unlike the majority, I believe that we must act in accordance not with our personal weighing of the equities, but with the law.
Ejelonu is before this Court on appeal from an order of the Board of Immigration Appeals (“BIA”) dismissing her appeal of an Immigration Judge’s (“IJ”) order of removal. The INS began removal proceedings in February 2000 after Ejelonu pleaded guilty to two counts of embezzlement. After Ejelonu moved to terminate the removal proceedings, the IJ concluded that Ejelonu was not a citizen of the United States and that she had been convicted of two separate crimes of moral turpitude. Ejelonu appealed this decision to the BIA, which dismissed the appeal and found Ejelonu removable under the Immigration and Naturalization Act.
Ejelonu has raised only two issues before this Court. First, she contends that the BIA erred in holding that her guilty plea entered under the M.C.L. § 762.11 constitutes a “conviction” for immigration purposes. Second, she argues that the BIA erred in upholding the IJ’s determination that she was not a citizen because she failed to obtain a certificate of citizenship before her eighteenth birthday. Ejel-onu does not succeed in proving either of these claims.
Ejelonu did not meet the statutory requirement for citizenship because she was not under the age of eighteen when the INS adjudicated her mother’s application on her behalf. See 8 U.S.C. § 1433(a). It is unfortunately irrelevant that the INS caused this problem by delaying for more than seven months the processing of Ejelo-nu’s citizenship application. The Supreme Court clearly held in INS v. Pangilinan, 486 U.S. 875, 883-84, 108 S.Ct. 2210, 100 L.Ed.2d 882 (1988), that equitable powers cannot be invoked to confer citizenship in the absence of a statutory requirement. “A court [ ] cannot, by avowing that there is a right but no remedy known to the law, create a remedy in violation of law.” Id. at 883,108 S.Ct. 2210.
Congress has defined the term “conviction,” with respect to an alien, as “a formal *554judgment of guilt of the alien entered by a court or [ ] where — (i) a judge or jury has found the alien guilty or the alien has entered a plea of guilty or nolo contendere [], and (ii) the judge has ordered some form of punishment, penalty, or restraint on the alien’s liberty to be imposed.” 8 U.S.C. § 1101 (a)(48)(A). As the majority opinion concedes, in order to be assigned to youthful trainee status under Michigan’s HYTA, an individual charged with an offense must plead guilty; Ejelonu “took advantage of this opportunity;” and the court placed her on probation and ordered her to make restitution. Although M.C.L. § 762.11 does not define Ejelonu’s guilty plea as a conviction per se, it was certainly not unreasonable for the IJ or BIA to determine that it was a conviction within the meaning of § 1101(a)(48)(A). A court may not substitute its own construction of a statutory provision for a reasonable interpretation made by an agency. Chevron U.S.A., Inc., v. Natural Resources Defense Council, 467 U.S. 837, 844, 104 S.Ct. 2778, 81 L.Ed.2d 694 (1984).
II.
Dissatisfied with the result dictated by Ejelonu’s inability to succeed on the claims that she did raise, the majority now sua sponte decides that Ejelonu in fact petitioned this Court for a writ of audita querela. There is no support for this conclusion in Ejelonu’s Petition for Review or in any of the parties’ briefs. Ejelonu did not request a writ of audita querela, or any other writ, for that matter. The government, understandably failing to divine the possibility that the majority of this panel would conjure up an extraordinary, out-of-use writ to reach the end it seeks, had no opportunity whatsoever to brief or otherwise address the issuance of such a writ. The only questions raised by Ejelo-nu, and therefore, the only questions before this Court, are (1) whether the BIA erred in holding that her guilty plea constitutes a “conviction” for immigration purposes, and (2) whether the BIA erred in upholding the IJ’s determination that she was not a citizen. Our analysis should have been limited to those questions.
If Ejelonu had in fact requested a writ of audita querela, it would be improper for this Court to grant one. Congress prohibited the federal courts from using the writ in civil cases in the 1940s. See Fed. R. Civ. Pro. 60(b). “Writs of coram nobis, coram vobis, audita querela, and bills of review and bills in the nature of a bill of review, are abolished, and the procedure for obtaining any relief from a judgment shall be by motion as prescribed in the rules or by an independent action.” Id. This was quite in line with no less an authority than William Blackstone, who, in 1768, said of the writ,
[It] is a writ of a most remedial nature, and seems to have been invented, lest in any case there should be an oppressive defect of justice, where a party has a good defence, but by the ordinary forms of law had no opportunity to make it. But the indulgence now shown by the courts in granting a summary relief upon motion, in cases of such evident oppression, has almost rendered useless the writ of audita querela, and driven it quite out of practice.
3 WILLIAM BLACKSTONE, COMMENTARIES ON the Laws of England 405 (William D. Lewis ed.1900).
Rule 60(b) clearly applies to this appeal from an order of the BIA, which is a civil matter, and not, as the majority seems to imply, “a criminal proceeding.” As the Supreme Court itself has noted, “[a] deportation proceeding is a purely civil action to determine eligibility to remain in this country.” INS v. Lopez-Mendoza, 468 *555U.S. 1032, 1038, 104 S.Ct. 3479, 82 L.Ed.2d 778 (1984).
Struggling to explain its conjuration, the majority says, “As an infrequently used remedy, modern courts have struggled to define the scope of the writ.” This assertion is simply not accurate. Courts have not, in cases like the one before us now, “struggled” at all. Every circuit that has addressed this issue has refused to issue a writ of audita, querela absent proof of some legal defect in the underlying proceedings, or a legal objection that arose subsequent to the underlying proceeding. And in each of these cases — unlike the instant case — the petitioner sought to vacate a conviction. See United States v. Ayala, 894 F.2d 425, 430 (D.C.Cir.1990) (denying petitioner’s request for the writ and holding that “a federal court can vacate a criminal conviction pursuant to the common law writ of audita querela only if the writ permits a defendant to raise a legal objection not cognizable under existing federal postconviction remedies”); Doe v. INS, 120 F.3d 200, 204 (9th Cir.1997) (holding that “a writ of audita querela, if it survives at all, is available only if a defendant has a legal defense or discharge to the underlying judgment”) (emphasis added); United States v. LaPlante, 57 F.3d 252, 253 (2d Cir.1995) (“Audita querela is probably available where there is a legal, as contrasted with an equitable, objection to a conviction that has arisen subsequent to the conviction and that is not redressa-ble pursuant to another post-conviction remedy.”) (emphasis added); United States v. Johnson, 962 F.2d 579, 582-83 (7th Cir.1992) (“The defense or discharge must be a legal defect in the conviction.... Equities or gross injustice, in themselves, will not satisfy the legal objection requirement and will not provide a basis for relief.”); United States v. Reyes, 945 F.2d 862, 866 (5th Cir.1991) (stating that allowing the writ “to vacate a conviction on purely equitable grounds ... ‘purports to add a new remedy’ ” for which there is “no adequate statutory or historical warrant to authorize federal courts to grant such relief’); United States v. Holder, 936 F.2d 1, 5 (1st Cir.1991) (holding that the writ, “if available at all ... can only be available where there is a legal objection to a conviction, which has arisen subsequent to that conviction, and which is not redressable pursuant to another post-conviction remedy”) (emphasis in original).
According to Black’s Law Dictionary, a writ of audita querela is “a common law writ constituting the initial process in an action brought by a judgment defendant to obtain relief against the consequences of the judgment on account of some matter of defense or discharge arising since its rendition and which could not have been taken advantage of otherwise.” BlaCK’s Law DICTIONARY 120 (spec. 5th ed.1979) (emphasis added); see also, Reyes, 945 F.2d at 863 n. 1 (same). The other circuits that have considered the writ could not have been more clear in their findings. “[T]he writ of audita querela does not and cannot, under any stretch of the imagination, provide a purely equitable basis for relief independent of any legal defect in the underlying judgment.” Holder, 936 F.2d at 3.
Nonetheless, in the present case, the majority relies solely on its appeal to equity to grant the “requested” relief. The majority acknowledges there was no legal defect in the underlying proceedings, and fails to cite to any subsequent fact or defense, arising after judgment, that Ejel-onu could not have previously raised. The majority instead relies upon the writings of one law professor, as well as selected quotes from William Blackstone and historian William Holdsworth for the proposition that the writ is of “essentially equitable character.” From there the majority *556concludes that granting a writ of audita querela is appropriate in the present case because it would be “contrary to justice” to do otherwise.
The majority’s reasoning is specious. The proposition that the writ has a basis in equity does not support the conclusion that it can or should be granted to prevent a perceived injustice. Although the majority frequently quotes Blackstone, it fails to note that Blackstone himself emphasized that one seeking the writ must show a post-judgment contingency supplying a “matter of discharge” or “defense.” 3 William Blaokstone, COMMENTARIES on the Laws of England 404 (William D. Lewis ed.1900). Indeed, the majority’s use of equity in this case entirely overlooks one of the fundamentals of the nature of equity: “Equity suffers not a Right to be without a Remedy.” Richard Francis, Maxims of Equity 24 (London, Bernard Lintot 1728) (emphasis added). Equity, in other words, does not exist “upstairs over a vacant lot;” rather, equity is founded on rights, and exists to provide a remedy unavailable at law when those rights are violated. Nowhere does the majority opinion identify the “right” of this petitioner that the majority would remedy through the use of this writ.
Nor is the case law employed by the majority persuasive. The majority gives particular weight to the Tenth Circuit’s decision in Oliver v. City of Shattuck ex rel. Versluis, 157 F.2d 150 (1946), a case that pre-dated and helped to prompt the 1946 amendments to Rule 60(b) that abolished audita querela and similar writs. See Ira P. Robbins, The Revitalization of the Common-Law Civil Writ of Audita Querela as a Post conviction Remedy in Criminal Cases: The Immigration Context and Beyond, 6 Geo. Immigr. L.J. 643, 660 (1992) (“As a result of Oliver and other Rule 60(b) cases, audita querela and co-rum nobis clearly still existed as civil remedies .... The advisory committee reacted to this development by amending Rule 60 in 1946.”). (citations omitted). Even Oliver, moreover, • stated that the writ was invented to afford relief to “one against whom execution had been issued or was about to be issued upon a judgment, which it would be contrary to justice to allow to be enforced, because of matters arising subsequent to the rendition thereof.” Oliver, 157 F.2d at 153 (emphasis added).
This defect in reasoning is not eured by the curious argument in the majority’s footnote 5 that “the removal proceeding against Petitioner under 8 U.S.C. § 1227(a)(2)(A)(ii) constituted a matter which arose subsequent to the disposition under the HYTA.” This completely misses the point. The order before us in this appeal — and the order to which the majority opinion purports to direct this extraordinary writ — is the order of the BIA dismissing Ejelonu’s appeal of the IJ’s order of removal. The order before us is not, as the majority seems to believe in footnote 5, Ejelonu’s state conviction — an order over which this court has no jurisdiction. In its final paragraphs, the majority opinion seems to recognize this, stating that “[o]ur mandate does not vacate or even suggest the invalidity of Michigan’s ‘judgment’ ... nor do we purport to lift any of the concomitant sanctions Michigan imposed.” As a matter of logic, the argument in footnote 5 and this statement from the majority cannot both be true. See Aristotle, MetaphysiCS, § 1005bl2-20 (“[T]he most certain principle of all is that about which it is impossible to be mistaken.... It is clear, then, that such a principle is the most certain of all and we can state it thus: ‘It is impossible for the same thing at the same time to belong and not belong to the same thing at the same time and in the same respect.’ ”). And as a matter of law, the only order to which this court has *557jurisdiction to direct an extraordinary writ is the order of the BIA. Even if Congress, arguendo, had not expressly eliminated the writ of audita querela in civil proceedings, the only events material to this court’s review would be events occurring subsequent to the BIA’s order.
The majority relies upon two district court cases, United States v. Salgado, 692 F.Supp. 1265 (E.D.Wash.1988), and United States v. Ghebreziabher, 701 F.Supp. 115 (E.D.La.1988), as examples of courts’ granting writs of audita querela for purely equitable reasons, “to mitigate the collateral consequences of an earlier criminal conviction when failing to do so would have produced an unconscionable result.” The majority’s reliance on these cases is severely misplaced. Salgado and Ghebrezia-bher have been widely and, until today, uniformly criticized by each circuit that has considered this issue. Neither case represents the law of the land in its own circuit. See Doe, 120 F.3d at 203 (finding that “Salgado and Ghebreziabher were mistaken, as a historical matter, in their conclusion that audita querela furnishes a purely ‘equitable’ basis for relief independent of any legal defect in the underlying judgment”); Reyes, 945 F.2d at 866 (stating that “the Salgado and Ghebreziabher courts had strayed from the original bounds of the writ” and that such use of the writ “usurp[ed] the power of Congress to set naturalization and deportation standards and the power of the INS to administer those standards”). Unable to find anything to support its holding, the majority also cites to United States v. Javan-mard, 767 F.Supp. 1109 (D.Kan.1991), a case in which, as the majority itself admits, “the court refused to grant a writ of audi-ta querela” under the belief that it could only do so if a legal error occurred in the initial proceeding. See id. at 1110-11.
Having sua sponte granted the writ, the majority opinion anticipatorily repudiates the well-deserved charge that the granting of this writ raises separation of powers concerns, protesting that “[i]f Congress dislikes what we have done, it can prohibit courts from issuing writs of audita querela with respect to the collateral consequences of criminal convictions just as Congress terminated the judiciary’s ability to issue such writs in ordinary civil proceedings by implementing Fed.R.Civ.P. 60(b).” This statement necessitates one of two conclusions, both of which are untenable. The first is that the Court is vacating the collateral consequence of the underlying state action. This Court has no authority to take such action, and such an interpretation clearly contradicts the majority’s statement that its mandate “does not vacate or even suggest the invalidity of Michigan’s ‘judgment.’ ” The only other possible interpretation is that Ejelonu’s appeal to the BIA, and the underlying judgment of the IJ, are “criminal proceedings” and the order of removal is a “criminal conviction.” The Supreme Court, I suspect, would be surprised by this view. See INS v. Lopez-Mendoza, 468 U.S. at 1038, 104 S.Ct. 3479 (“A deportation proceeding is a purely civil action to determine eligibility to remain in this country.”). The majority protests further that its holding portends no threat to the ability of DHS to carry out its statutory duties, because this opinion “will not support relief if deportation is either not unconscionable or where DHS can articulate any legitimate reason for its decision to deport.” (emphasis in original). But the DHS did articulate a legitimate reason for its decision to deport: Ejelonu was deport-able under 8 U.S.C. § 1227(a)(2)(A)(ii), and the majority opinion concedes that it can point to no legal defect in that conclusion.
III.
I do not want to see Ejelonu deported. If the majority opinion represented a legit*558imate means by which to overturn the BIA’s deportation order, I could — and would — join it without hesitation. It doesn’t, and I can’t. The writ of audita querela, which Congress has explicitly abolished in civil proceedings, cannot provide any legal basis for relief in this case. Today’s majority, by sua sponte granting this writ, intrudes upon the power of Congress to set naturalization and deportation standards and the power of the Department of Homeland Security to administer those standards in each individual case. “Absent a clearer statutory or historical basis, an Article III court should not arrogate such power unto itself.” Reyes, 945 F.2d at 866.
For the foregoing reasons, I respectfully dissent.