Court Opinion

ID: 9464084
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-04 23:24:58.217428+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:38:27.324674
License: Public Domain

GOLDBERG, Circuit Judge,
dissenting:
Believing that today’s decision is inconsistent with the standards we announced in our earlier opinion in this very case, I respectfully dissent. That opinion and earlier decisions indicate that the crucial consideration in the case at bar should be the ratio of domestic to international traffic intercepted at the checkpoint. The La Gloria location, at which border patrol agents almost certainly interdict more domestic than international travelers, is not the functional equivalent of the border.
Searches at the border, based on the “long-standing right of the sovereign to protect itself by stopping and examining persons and property crossing into this country,” United States v. Ramsey, 431 U.S. 606, 616, 97 S.Ct. 1972, 1979, 52 L.Ed.2d 617 (1977), do not require warrants or probable cause. The Supreme Court has made clear, moreover, that such searches need not be conducted precisely at the border itself. Government agents may search at the “functional equivalent” of the border, which may sometimes include interior airports receiving international flights and checkpoints along highways leading from the border. In extending this concept to the La Gloria checkpoint, however, the majority moves away from earlier statements of the Supreme Court and our own circuit. I view the move as unfortunate.
The Supreme Court’s one attempt to explicate functional equivalence came in Al-meida-Sanchez v. United States, 413 U.S. 266, 272-73, 93 S.Ct. 2535, 37 L.Ed.2d 596 (1973). Rather than attempt a comprehensive formulation, the Court listed two instances where that concept might apply:
For example, searches at an established station near the border, at a point marking the confluence of two or more roads that extend from the border, might be functional equivalents of border searches. For another example, a search of the passengers and cargo of an airplane arriving at a St. Louis airport after a nonstop flight from Mexico City would clearly be the functional equivalent of a border search.
Id. (footnote omitted).
We explained these examples in our thorough and well-reasoned opinion in United States v. Brennan, 538 F.2d 711 (5th cir. 1976). After quoting the above passage from Almeida-Sanchez, we said:
In the first example there inheres a high degree of probability that a border crossing took place and an attendant likelihood that nothing about the object of the search has changed since the crossing. . In the case of the airport search of the nonstop flight, both assumptions become certainties.
538 F.2d at 715 (emphasis added). We sounded the same note in another careful opinion announced almost simultaneously. In United States v. Calvillo, 537 F.2d 158 (5th Cir. 1976), we refused to extend border status to the Freer checkpoint, emphasizing that “the functional equivalency label is one not lightly to be bestowed.” Id. at 160. We noted:
There is no showing that the vehicles passing through the Freer checkpoint were likely to have recently crossed the border or that the area was a natural collecting point for illegal aliens making their way into the interior.
537 F.2d at 161 (emphasis added).
Our initial encounter with the case at bar followed closely upon these statements from Brennan and Calvillo. In United States v. Alvarez-Gonzalez, 542 F.2d 226 (5th Cir. 1976) [Alvarez-Gonzalez I], we remanded the case for further fact-finding in regard to functional equivalence. In what can be characterized only as a thoughtful and carefully phrased opinion, Judge Gee set forth the standards that were to govern the functional equivalence inquiry. I joined that opinion in the hope that it charted the moderate course adumbrated by the Supreme Court in Almeida-Sanchez and adhered to by us in such cases as Calvillo and Brennan.
*627Alvarez-Gonzalez I identified three major considerations that should guide the inquiry into border status: “relative permanence, relatively minimal interdiction of domestic traffic, [and] a capability to monitor portions of international traffic not otherwise practically controllable.” 542 F.2d at 229.1 Our further explication of the second of these factors, if followed conscientiously, would compel the denial of functional equivalence to La Gloria. We said:
The presence of a continuing and significant percentage of domestic traffic through a given checkpoint cannot but be seen as militating against granting it the status of functional equivalency.
No checkpoint which occasions, day in and day out, the interdiction of anything approaching a majority percentage of domestic traffic can properly be seen as approximating the border.
542 F.2d at 229 (emphasis added).2
This language from Alvarez-Gonzalez I cannot stand alongside the result in the case at bar. The district court determined that 40% of the northbound La Gloria traffic was domestic, 60% international.3 The court excluded from that category some travelers whose trips were confined wholly within the United States. These trips originated in the “border area,” which the majority describes as “sparsely populated,” ante at 623, but which included the major cities of Brownsville and part of McAllen.4
The majority justifies classifying as “international” those trips from one United States location to another on the grounds that such trips play an important role in violations of the immigration laws. While I join the majority’s concern for the integrity of those laws, I cannot join its apparent belief that functional equivalency is a concept that frees the border search principle from its historical moorings, the “right of the sovereign to protect itself by stopping and examining persons and property crossing into this country." United States v. *628Ramsey, 431 U.S. 606, 616, 97 S.Ct. 1972, 1979, 52 L.Ed.2d 617 (1977) (emphasis added).
Rather than a device for circumventing fourth amendment restraints on searches of those who have not recently entered the country, the functional equivalency concept is one designed merely to allow searches of international travelers at interior points that, when compared to the border itself, are more convenient (because, for example, located at the confluence of two highways, eliminating the need for a border checkpoint on each) or more effective (because, for example, those travelling inward would more likely pass through such a station than through one located on the border itself). In practical operation, any highway checkpoint removed from the border will interdict some domestic travelers, and I certainly do not suggest that that fact prevents the point from achieving border status or casts any doubt on the authority to search such travelers at those locations. I do insist, however, that a checkpoint must achieve the functional equivalency label on the basis of its capacity to intercept international travelers, not on the basis of its ability to stop mira-national travelers, however useful such stops might prove in controlling border violations.
This analysis indicates that the crucial factor in differentiating between international and domestic traffic is whether the vehicles’ passengers or contents have crossed the international boundary in the immediate past.5 Not only is this view compelled by the reasoning and overall framework of the Supreme Court’s border search decisions, but it is also the view that Alvarez-Gonzalez I seemed implicitly to adopt. In the midst of our discussion of the distinction between international and domestic traffic, we quoted the Ninth Circuit’s description of what we labeled “this ratio.” 542 F.2d at 229. The Ninth Circuit described the two components of “this ratio” as people who have “just come from the other side of the border” and those who “are domestic travelers going from one point to another within the United States.” United States v. Bowen, 500 F.2d 960, 965 (9th Cir. 1974), aff’d, 422 U.S. 916, 95 S.Ct. 2569, 45 L.Ed.2d 641 (1975), quoted in United States v. Alvarez-Gonzalez, 542 F.2d 226, 229 (5th Cir. 1976). In Alvarez-Gonzalez I we gave not the slightest hint that we had anything else in mind. Our statements, moreover, were cast from the same lot as our virtually simultaneous references to the “probability that a border crossing took place,” United States v. Brennan, 538 F.2d 711, 715 (5th Cir. 1976) (emphasis added), and to the likelihood that the vehicles “recently crossed the border,” United States v. Calvillo, 537 F.2d 158, 161 (5th Cir. 1976) (emphasis added). There simply is no basis for adopting instead the approach taken by the majority in the case at bar.6
We are left, then, with a checkpoint at which the proportion of domestic travelers, properly defined, is 40% plus whatever percentage originates in the “border area” on the United States side. Thus the domestic share probably exceeds 50%.7 In Alvarez-Gonzalez I we flatly declared that, regardless of other criteria, the existence of “anything approaching a majority percentage of *629domestic traffic” would preclude functional equivalence classification. 542 F.2d at 229. I would adhere to that pronouncement.
Moreover, even accepting the majority’s erroneous definition of international, the share of domestic traffic is too great to pass muster. I would have thought it clear that 40% constituted “anything approaching a majority percentage” within the Alvarez-Gonzalez I formulation. And even if 40% is not “anything approaching a majority percentage,” it certainly qualifies as the “significant percentage” that we said “cannot but be seen as militating against” functional equivalence. 542 F.2d at 229.8 The majority opinion in the instant case refuses even to acknowledge that the La Gloria ratio so militates, describing domestic traffic instead as “minimal.” My hope is that today’s result will prove aberrant, with future decisions according more effect to what we said in Alvarez-Gonzalez I than to what we do today. By proclaiming adherence to the Alvarez-Gonzalez I standards and by merely labeling the La Gloria interdiction of domestic traffic “minimal,” the majority certainly leaves room for future courts to confine this case to its facts.9
In closing, I must emphasize that I am not insensitive to the law enforcement interests to which the majority pays such heed. The majority may well be correct that allowing searches at La Gloria without probable cause would increase the detection of aliens illegally entering the country. The degree to which that would be true is not free of doubt; many of those apprehended might also be detected if La Gloria were operated simply as a permanent checkpoint, with border patrol agents free to stop all cars, to question all occupants, and to search whenever after the questioning there was probable cause under the none-too-stringent standards that have emerged in this context. It is this procedure that the Supreme Court chose as an accommodation of the competing governmental and private interests that are implicated here. In opting for a different balance, the majority accords insufficient weight to the Supreme Court’s admonition in Almeida-Sanchez v. United States, 413 U.S. 266, 274, 93 S.Ct. 2535, 2540, 37 L.Ed.2d 596 (1973):
It is not enough to argue, as does the Government, that the problem of deterring unlawful entry by aliens across long expanses of national boundaries is a serious one. The needs of law enforcement stand in constant tension with the Constitution’s protections of the individual against certain exercises of official power. It is precisely the predictability of these pressures that counsels a resolute loyalty to constitutional safeguards. It is well to recall the words of Mr. Justice Jackson, soon after his return from the Nuremberg Trials:
“These [Fourth Amendment rights], I protest, are not mere second-class rights but belong in the catalog of indispensable freedoms. Among deprivations of rights, none is so effective in cowing a population, crushing the spirit of the individual and putting terror in every heart. Uncontrolled search and seizure is one of the first and most effective weapons in the arsenal of every arbitrary government.” Brinegar v. United States, 338 U.S. 160, 180, 69 S.Ct. 1302, 1313, 93 L.Ed. 1879, (Jackson, J., dissenting).
La Gloria is a garden variety permanent checkpoint. The Supreme Court has held that agents may search at permanent checkpoints only on the basis of probable cause. United States v. Ortiz, 422 U.S. 891, 95 S.Ct. 2585, 46 L.Ed.2d 623 (1975). Because the agents here concededly lacked *630probable cause, the conviction should be reversed. I respectfully dissent.

. The first factor, relative permanence, is important in other contexts but provides little guidance in a case such as the one at bar, where the choice is between classifying a location as a “permanent checkpoint” or as a “functional equivalent.” Permanent checkpoints are permanent by definition. Thus while 1 agree La Gloria is permanent (a conclusion I reach without the majority’s uncalled for deference to the border patrol’s own characterization), I attribute little significance to this conclusion in analyzing functional equivalence.

. In the omitted portion of the quoted passage we noted the Ninth Circuit’s handling of this same criterion:
[l]f a search takes place at a location where virtually everyone searched has just come from the other side of the border, the search is a functional equivalent of a border search. In contrast, if a search takes place at a location where a significant number of those stopped are domestic travelers going from one point to another within the United States, the search is not the function equivalent of a border search.
United States v. Bowen, 500 F.2d 960, 965 (9th Cir. 1974), aff'd, 422 U.S. 916, 95 S.Ct. 2569, 45 L.Ed.2d 641 (1975) (emphasis added), quoted without emphasis in United States v. Alvarez-Gonzalez, 542 F.2d 226, 229 (5th Cir. 1976). We refused to follow the Ninth Circuit’s suggestion that this factor standing alone is always dispositive, but we made clear that “we do emphasize the significance of this consideration.” 542 F.2d at 229.

. These figures derive from a two-week survey the border patrol conducted in response to our remand in Alvarez-Gonzalez I. The majority’s statement that the international portion was higher in a later five-day survey is unsupportable; during the later survey the border patrol did not attempt to ascertain the proportions of domestic and international traffic. Record at 193. Although during the second survey the average daily number of aliens apprehended was greater than during the first survey, Record at 194, that says nothing at all about the division of all traffic between domestic and international.

. The majority minimizes the significance of including Brownsville and McAllen, saying that most inhabitants of those cities use other routes when travelling to the north. That there may be few Brownsville residents who pass through the checkpoint, however, has nothing at all to do with whether their trips should be labeled “international; ” it affects only the volume and thus the significance of these clearly “domestic” trips. If there are indeed few northbound trips originating in the “border area,” then the majority and the border patrol should have little to fear from properly classifying such trips as domestic. It is precisely the interdiction of such domestic travelers upon which Alvarez-Gonzalez I focused.

. I do not undertake to define the “immediate past” within this formulation. In Brennan we spoke of the “likelihood that nothing about the object of the search has changed since the crossing.” 538 F.2d at 715. That statement seems completely reasonable. In any event, whatever the appropriate standard, I view as totally unacceptable the majority’s intimation that everyone in the border area can be treated as having recently entered the country on the basis of the frequency with which it presumes those persons visit Mexico. Ante at 623-624. I would count as “international” only those vehicles containing passengers, whether in the driver’s seat or the trunk, who have just come from Mexico.

. The possibility of counting as “international” those trips wholly within the United States probably never would have received any consideration had the border patrol not chosen to employ the approach when it conducted its survey in response to our opinion.

. The border patrol agent who conducted the survey described as “quite a few” the number of trips originating in only a portion of the United States “border area.” Record at 192.

. On this view we would classify La Gloria as the functional equivalent only if the third Alvarez-Gonzalez I factor — the “capability to monitor portions of international traffic not otherwise practically controllable” — strongly favored that result.

. If we are indeed to bestow the functional equivalency label as lightly as does the majority, I join wholeheartedly in its suggested limitation to “cursory inspections] limited to cavities large enough to contain a human form.” Ante at 625. Although traditional border searches are not so limited, I believe the majority has moved beyond traditional border searches. If we are to make that move, I would join an effort to cabin the new concept within reasonable bounds.