Court Opinion

ID: 9498371
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 17:16:00.131839+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:58:48.001263
License: Public Domain

FISHER, Circuit Judge,
with whom D.W. NELSON, Senior Circuit Judge, joins, concurring:
Although we hold that Mendiola-Sanchez v. Ashcroft, 381 F.3d 937 (9th Cir.2004), compels us to affirm application of the 90/180-day rule to Garcia-Ramirez, we do so reluctantly because we remain unconvinced that Ram v. INS, 243 F.3d 510 (9th Cir.2001), required the result reached in Mendiola-Sanchez, and because we believe that Gareia-Ramirez would have prevailed under the second step of the retro-activity test articulated in Landgraf v. USI Film Products, 511 U.S. 244, 114 S.Ct. 1483, 128 L.Ed.2d 229 (1994).
The Mendiolctr-Sanchez panel articulated its own regret in holding that the 90/180-day rule must apply retroactively to the Mendiolas:
Although we deny the petition for review because that is the proper conclu*942sion under the relevant statutes, we pause in recognition of the injustice of this result.... The only reason the Mendiolas are ineligible for suspension of deportation is that they stayed too long in Mexico to help Mr. Mendiola-Sanchez’s elderly parents recover from unexpected injuries.
Mendiola-Sanchez, 381 F.3d at 941. Nonetheless, the panel concluded that the “core of the reasoning in Ram applie[d] to the 90/180 day rule” and that it was “very unlikely that Congress intended to apply only the stop-time rule retroactively, and not the 90/180 day rule.” Id. at 940^41. Accordingly, the panel held that Ram controlled and denied the Mendiolas’ petition for relief.
We do not think that Ram required the result in Mendiola-Sanchez. Section 309(c)(5)(A) of IIRIRA (included in the statute’s “transitional rules”) instructs that the stop-time and 90/180-day rules should be applied to petitioners whose cases were pending on IIRIRA’s effective date whether their orders to show cause were issued “on, before, or after” IIRIRA’s enactment. With regard to the stop-time rule, this provision constitutes unambiguous congressional intent that the statute be applied retroactively: regardless of when an alien’s order to show cause was issued, her accrued continuous presence time must, under § 309(c)(5)(A), stop on that date. Application of § 309(c)(5)(A) to the 90/180-day rule, however, is slightly more complicated because it changes the rules as to actions the petitioner has already taken.
Under Ram, § 309(c)(5)(A) requires that the 90/180-day rule apply to petitioners whose cases were pending when IIRIRA became effective, but Ram has no effect on a subsequent question — whether even if the 90/180-day rule applies to a petitioner’s case, it applies to trips that she took before Congress passed IIRIRA. The Mendiola-Sanchez panel did not consider this second question, not present in Ram, before reaching its conclusion that Ram controlled. On a blank slate, we would construe § 309(c)(5)(A) as expressing congressional intent to apply the 90/180-day rule to all petitioners whose cases were pending when IIRIRA became effective on April 1, 1997, but only to their absences from the country that post-date IIRIRA’s enactment on September 30, 1996. Admittedly, the rule would then affect only a very small class of petitioners. But applying the Landgraf standard, we would not read the statute to attach penalties to trips taken before Congress passed IIRIRA, absent express, unambiguous congressional intent to do so.
Further, if Mendiola-Sanchez erred in finding congressional intent in § 309(e)(5)(A) — which we respectfully think it did but which we accept as binding on us — we believe that Garcia-Ramirez would be entitled to a remand for reconsideration of her petition under the old standard. Where Congress has not clearly specified otherwise, the traditional presumption against retroactivity applies if the statute would have retroactive effect.
A statute has retroactive effect when it takes away or impairs vested rights acquired under existing laws, or creates a new obligation, imposes a new duty, or attaches a new disability, in respect to transactions or considerations already past.
INS v. St. Cyr, 533 U.S. 289, 321, 121 S.Ct. 2271, 150 L.Ed.2d 347 (2001) (quoting Landgraf, 511 U.S. at 269, 114 S.Ct. 1483) (internal quotation marks omitted) (emphasis added). Retroactivity analysis involves a “commonsense, functional judgment about whether the new provision attaches new legal consequences to events completed before its enactment,” and is “informed and guided by familiar consider*943ations of fair notice, reasonable reliance, and settled expectations.” Id. (quoting Martin v. Hadix, 527 U.S. 343, 357-58, 119 S.Ct. 1998, 144 L.Ed.2d 347 (1999)) (internal quotation marks omitted) (emphasis added).
On its face, the application of § 1229b(d)(2) to Garcia-Ramirez long after the fact of her 1989 five-month trip to Mexico clearly “attaeh[es] a new disability, in respect to [a transaction] already past.” Id. At the time she took her trip, Garcia-Ramirez risked that her absence would later be judged not to have been “brief, casual, and innocent,” thereby effectively restarting the clock when she returned in 1990. She did not have an assurance, therefore, that her departure and return would have no adverse effect; but she likewise did not have reason to believe that her five-month absence would automatically negate her accrued time and restart the clock — which is the effect of applying the new bright-line rule of the 1997 statute. “There is a clear difference, for the purposes of retroactivity analysis, between facing possible deportation and facing certain deportation.” Id. at 325, 121 S.Ct. 2271. Because applying § 1229b(d)(2) to Garcia-Ramirez “attaches new legal consequences to events completed before its enactment,” doing so has an impermissibly retroactive effect. Id. at 321, 121 S.Ct. 2271 (quoting Martin, 527 U.S. at 357-58, 119 S.Ct. 1998 (quoting Landgraf, 511 U.S. at 270, 114 S.Ct. 1483)).
Elementary notions of fairness and fair notice, reasonable reliance, settled expectations and commonsense also counsel in favor of applying the traditional presumption of nonretroactivity. When Garcia-Ramirez took her trip, she had no reason to believe that her absence would automatically disqualify her from eligibility for relief; she could reasonably rely on the law at the time as governing the effects of her departure. The change in law should not, absent clearly expressed Congressional intent, bar her eligibility retroactively. When a statute converts a five-month trip from a risk of losing eligibility for relief from removal to an automatic certainty, what greater need is there for notice and a chance to conform one’s behavior to the new, bright-line rule? This is a paradigm instance of the law imposing a new legal disability based on an event completed before the law changed. Nonetheless, because Judge Gould does not agree with us, we will address the specific arguments for and against retroactivity.
Section 1229b(d)(2) should be imper-missibly retroactive as applied to Garcia-Ramirez because the 90/180-day rule automatically makes her ineligible for cancellation of removal, whereas she would not be automatically ineligible for such relief under the pre-IIRIRA “brief, casual, and innocent” standard. She did not seek an assurance that her absence was in fact “brief, casual, and innocent”; instead, she sought eligibility to argue this point to the BIA on remand. Analogously, in St. Cyr, the Supreme Court held that IIRIRA’s elimination of discretionary relief for aliens convicted of aggravated felonies could not be applied retroactively to an alien who had pled guilty before IIRIRA’s effective date. See id. at 326, 121 S.Ct. 2271.
Although Garcia-Ramirez cannot point to the kind of quid pro quo that the Supreme Court presumed to have occurred in St. Cyr — a guilty plea — the Court has by no means set forth quid pro quo as the only route for demonstrating that a statute is impermissibly retroactive. Rather, “[n]o single consideration is essential. Retroactivity analysis under Landgraf requires independent analysis of whatever factors may apply, any of which can ground a finding of impermissible retroac*944tive application.” Chang v. United States, 327 F.3d 911, 920 n. 8 (9th Cir.2003); see also Hughes Aircraft Co. v. United States, 520 U.S. 939, 947, 117 S.Ct. 1871, 138 L.Ed.2d 135 (1997) (emphasizing that “the Court has used various formulations to describe the functional conceptio[n] of legislative retroactivity”) (internal quotation marks omitted); Restrepo v. McElroy, 369 F.3d 627, 637 (2d Cir.2004) (“[T]he Court never suggested that all parties who claim that a statute has a retroactive effect must show the disruption of a quid pro quo exchange. And it would be out of keeping with the reasoning of St. Cyr [] to read such a quid pro quo requirement into that opinion. For in St. Cyr [], the Court observed that ‘categorical arguments are not particularly helpful in undertaking Landgrafs commonsense, functional retro-activity analysis.’ ”) (quoting St. Cyr, 533 U.S. at 324, 121 S.Ct. 2271).
Nor does our circuit law impose an additional requirement that in order to establish reliance on the old law, a petitioner must in all circumstances demonstrate actual, subjective reliance or a quid pro quo exchange to establish impermissible retro-activity. “Reasonable reliance may itself be based upon a quid pro quo, as in St. Cyr ... or merely on assurances as to the current status of the law.” Chang, 327 F.3d at 920 n. 8 (citation omitted) (holding that new INS rules could not be applied to investors whose petitions were approved before the rules were promulgated, because they would impose a new exhaustion requirement and take away the right of appeal without fair notice); see also Kankamalage v. INS, 335 F.3d 858, 863 (9th Cir.2003) (applying St. Cyr and concluding that a regulation impermissibly attached a new disability to an alien’s guilty plea, without examining whether the alien specifically bargained for eligibility at the time of the plea); United States v. Velasco-Medina, 305 F.3d 839, 849-50 (9th Cir.2002) (holding that Velasco-Medina could not have reasonably relied on the possibility of relief under the legal landscape at the time he entered his guilty plea).1
Thus we disagree with Judge Gould that applying St. Cyr to Garcia-Ramirez’s situation would constitute an extension either of St. Cyr or of retroactivity analysis more generally. Indeed, both the Third and the Fourth Circuits have recently rejected the contention that retroactivity analysis requires actual reliance or the type of quid pro quo exchange present in St. Cyr. See Ponnapula v. Ashcroft, 373 F.3d 480, 491-93 & n. 9 (3d Cir.2004) (holding that Supreme Court law requires “reasonable” not “actual” reliance, observing that “St. Cyr was an easy case on the retroactivity issue,” and noting that the presence of a quid pro quo is evidence of a reliance interest); Olatunji v. Ashcroft, 387 F.3d 383 (4th Cir.2004) (holding that consideration of reliance is irrelevant to statutory *945retroactivity analysis; alternatively, that only objectively reasonable reliance, not subjective reliance, is required).
There are several hallmarks of retroac-tivity present here that demonstrate that application of the 90/180-day rule to Garcia-Ramirez upsets settled expectations, without notice. First, “[tjhere is a clear difference, for the purposes of retroactivity analysis, between facing possible deportation and facing certain deportation.” St. Cyr, 533 U.S. at 325, 121 S.Ct. 2271. By pleading guilty to the charged offense, St. Cyr risked eventual deportation and denial of § 212(c) relief. The Supreme Court explained that turning the possibility of deportation into a certainty would have “a severe retroactive” effect. Id. Similarly, by leaving the country for five months, Garcia-Ramirez risked eventual deportation based on a later determination that her absence was not “brief, casual, and innocent.” Applying IIRIRA now to her past conduct, however, makes her potential ineligibility for suspension of deportation absolute. Of course, Garcia-Ramirez had little accrued time when she took her trip to Mexico in 1989. But however brief, that accrued time has turned out to be vital to her ability to satisfy the continuous physical presence requirements.
Second, there is a significant difference between a statute that extends the time required to qualify for possible relief from removal — extending the duration from seven to 10 years — and one that reaches back to prior conduct and automatically subtracts it from one’s accrued continuous presence. Thus, applying the presumption against retroactivity here would in no way conflict with our holding in Jimenez-Angeles v. Ashcroft, 291 F.3d 594 (9th Cir.2002), that IIRIRA’s new 10-year rule can be applied to petitioners who were present in the United States before its enactment. Jimenez-Angeles did not forfeit any part of her accumulated time — or suffer any consequences she could have avoided by changing her prior actions once her continuous presence clock began running had she known the requisite time would be extended to 10 years. A person in Garcia-Ramirez’s situation, on the other hand, could, with notice, simply have remained within the bounds of the 90/180-day parameters of the new law.
Third, considerations of reasonable reliance and fair notice counsel against the application of § 1229b(d)(2) to Garcia-Ramirez. Garcia-Ramirez’s “settled expectations must have been shaped by the then-current legal landscape.” Velasco-Medina, 305 F.3d at 849; see also Kankamalage, 335 F.3d at 863. When the “relevant past event” occurred, namely Garcia-Ramirez’s decision to leave the United States in 1989 for more than 90 days, she could reasonably have relied on existing law to conclude that her departure would not necessarily restart the clock on a bid to establish continuous physical presence in the United States. Landgraf, 511 U.S. at 270, 114 S.Ct. 1483. By contrast, Jimenez-Angeles had no basis in law for believing that her relevant past event — turning herself in before IIRIRA’s effective date— would cause the INS to place her into deportation proceedings before IIRIRA’s effective date or under pre-IIRIRA law. See Jimenez-Angeles, 291 F.3d at 602; see also Lopez-Urenda v. Ashcroft, 345 F.3d 788, 793 (9th Cir.2003); Vasquez-Zavala v. Ashcroft, 324 F.3d 1105, 1107-08 (9th Cir.2003).2 Far from relying on the mere *946hope of beneficence by the INS, in 1989 aliens such as Garcia-Ramirez had statutory assurance about how their temporary departures would be evaluated. See 8 U.S.C. § 1254(b)(2) (1995); Chang, 327 F.3d at 920 n. 8.
As in St. Cyr, Chang and Kankamalage, a finding of impermissible retroactivity here would not depend on Garcia-Ramirez showing that she actually, subjectively relied on 8 U.S.C. § 1254(b)(2) when she departed the United States. See St. Cyr, 533 U.S. at 322-25, 121 S.Ct. 2271 (presuming a quid pro quo without proof of actual reliance); see also Olatunji, 387 F.3d at 393 (“St. Cyr did not purport to add a subjective reliance requirement; rather it applied Landgraf to a set of facts that indicated ‘an obvious and severe retroactive effect.’ ” (citing St. Cyr, 533 U.S. at 325, 121 S.Ct. 2271) (emphasis added)); Ponnapula, 373 F.3d at 491 (“The Supreme Court has never required actual reliance or evidence thereof in the Land-graf line of cases, and has in fact assiduously eschewed an actual reliance requirement.”). Rather, given the statutory structure in 1989 — in which temporary absences were assessed under a judgmental, discretionary standard — -we would not presume that Garcia-Ramirez’s decision to remain in Mexico for more than 90 days would have been the same had § 1229b(d)(2)’s 90/180-day absolute limitation been on the books instead.
We would not dispense with the requirement of reasonable reliance. We simply find it to be objectively reasonable that an alien like Garcia-Ramirez, contemplating a trip outside ■ the United States in 1989, could reasonably rely on the then-applicable legal standard not later being converted to one that automatically restarted the clock on her continuous presence because she exceeded the 90-day limit — a limit she could have stayed within had that been the rule at the time. Therefore, applying § 1229b(d)(2) to her 1989 departure imper-missibly attaches new legal consequences that did not exist before IIRIRA. See Landgraf, 511 U.S. at 270, 114 S.Ct. 1483.
We agree with Judge Gould that Congress retains its superordinate role in formulating and reformulating our immigration laws. See Judge Gould concurrence at 11679. But it is settled law that in doing so, Congress must express its intent clearly. See, e.g., St. Cyr, 533 U.S. at 316, 121 S.Ct. 2271.3 Congress has not done so *947with respect to applying the new 90/180-day rule to trips taken before IIRIRA’s passage, and Gareia-Ramirez has demonstrated objectively reasonable reliance on the prior law. But for Mendiola-Sanchez, we would apply the “deeply rooted” presumption against retroactivity in favor of Gareia-Ramirez (and the Mendiolas). See Landgraf, 511 U.S. at 265, 114 S.Ct. 1483.

. Judge Gould challenges our reliance on Kankamalage and Velasco-Medina, stating that "these cases do not assist in de-emphasiz-ing the importance the Supreme Court in St. Cyr placed on reasonable reliance, settled expectations and vested interests." Judge Gould concurrence at 951. We agree that these cases require reasonable reliance, but objectively reasonable reliance. As both cases involve guilty pleas, they follow St. Cyr in holding that a guilty plea is evidence of reasonable reliance and do not speak to the question of what other circumstances might evidence reliance. In discussing the defendants' reliance and expectations, both cases turn on the state of the law at the time that the plea was entered, not on the defendant’s subjective expectations at that time. Thus, we held that, unlike St. Cyr and Kankama-lage, Velasco-Medina did not have settled expectations of § 212(c) relief because AEDPA put him on notice that such relief might not be available and his expectations "must have been shaped by the then-current legal landscape.” Velasco-Medina, 305 F.3d at 849.

. We have subsequently relied on this aspect of Jimenez-Angeles in concluding that two aliens who filed asylum applications on March 10, 1997 — shortly before IIRIRA went into effect on April 1, 1997 — had no settled expectations that they would be subject to deportation proceedings under pre-IIRIRA law rather than removal proceedings under *946IIRIRA. See Vasquez-Zavala, 324 F.3d at 1108. IIRIRA was not impermissibly retroactive as applied to these asylum applicants because, as was the case when Jimenez-Ange-les turned herself in, “any expectation that an INS action would thereafter commence could not support a sufficient expectation as to when it would commence.’’ Id. (emphasis in original); see also Lopez-Urenda, 345 F.3d at 794 (extending Vasquez-Zavala’s holding to aliens who filed asylum applications before IIRIRA's passage on September 30, 1996, because even assuming their asylum applications would be denied, the applicants “did not have settled expectations as to when proceedings against them would commence”) (emphasis in original).

. Judge Gould points to the REAL ID Act as an example of Congress implementing immigration law reform. See Judge Gould concurrence at 954 n. 7. The REAL ID Act illustrates our very point, because it contains express provisions instructing that certain changes in the law should be applied retrospectively and others only prospectively. See REAL ID Act, Pub.L. 109-13, 119 Stat. 231. Where such express instruction exists, we can be confident that Congress has weighed the costs and benefits of retroactive application of the new laws and has considered the potential hardships imposed on individuals who took actions under the old law. Absent such evidence that Congress has weighed and considered the effects of its new legislation on prior actions, we would not upset the settled expectations of petitioners like Garcia-Ramirez who took trips under the old legal landscape.