Court Opinion

ID: 9428132
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:22:54.959536+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:22:58.450271
License: Public Domain

Justice Stewart,
concurring in the result.
The Border Patrol officers in this case knew, or had rationally deduced, that “Chevron” had repeatedly shepherded illegal aliens up from the border; that his treks had commonly ended early in the morning around milepost 122 on Highway 86; that he usually worked on weekends; that he probably had made no trips for two weeks; and that trips were most likely when the weather was good. Knowing of this pattern, the officers could reasonably anticipate, even if they could not guarantee, the arrival of another group of aliens, led by Chevron, at milepost 122 on the first clear weekend night in late January 1977. Route 86 leads through almost uninhabited country, so little traveled in the hours of darkness that only 15 to 20 westbound vehicles passed the police during the five hours they watched that Sunday night. Only two vehicles capacious enough to carry a sizable group of illegal aliens went by. One of those two vehicles not only drove past them, but returned in the opposite direction after just enough time had elapsed for a journey to milepost 122 and back. This nocturnal round trip into “desolate desert terrain” would in any event have been puzzling. Coming when and as it did, surely the most likely explanation for it was that Chevron was again shepherding aliens.
In sum, the Border Patrol officers had discovered an abundance of “specific articulable facts” which, “together with rational inferences from [them],” entirely warranted a “suspicion that the vehicl[e] contain [ed] aliens who [might] be illegally in the country.” United States v. Brignoni-Ponce, *423422 U. S. 873, 884. Because the information possessed by the officers thus met the requirements established by the Brignoni-Ponce case for the kind of stop made here, I concur in the reversal of the judgment of the Court of Appeals.