Court Opinion

ID: 9940555
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2024-02-14 19:00:46.526241+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T13:45:00.052417
License: Public Domain

Appellate Case: 23-2112     Document: 010111000263       Date Filed: 02/14/2024     Page: 1
                                                                                   FILED
                                                                       United States Court of Appeals
                       UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS                          Tenth Circuit

                              FOR THE TENTH CIRCUIT                         February 14, 2024
                          _________________________________
                                                                          Christopher M. Wolpert
                                                                              Clerk of Court
  UNITED STATES OF AMERICA,

        Plaintiff - Appellee,

  v.                                                          No. 23-2112
                                                    (D.C. No. 2:23-CR-00067-KG-1)
  NOE SAUCEDO-SAUCEDO,                                         (D. N.M.)

        Defendant - Appellant.
                       _________________________________

                              ORDER AND JUDGMENT*
                          _________________________________

 Before MATHESON, EID, and CARSON, Circuit Judges.
                   _________________________________

       Noe Saucedo-Saucedo appeals the district court’s order denying his motion to

 dismiss his indictment. Exercising jurisdiction under 28 U.S.C. § 1291, we affirm.

                                  I. BACKGROUND

       When a Border Patrol agent found him in New Mexico, Mr. Saucedo-Saucedo

 admitted he was a citizen of Mexico without documentation allowing him to be in the

       *
         After examining the briefs and appellate record, this panel has determined
 unanimously to honor the parties’ request for a decision on the briefs without oral
 argument. See Fed. R. App. P. 34(f); 10th Cir. R. 34.1(G). The case is therefore
 submitted without oral argument. This order and judgment is not binding precedent,
 except under the doctrines of law of the case, res judicata, and collateral estoppel. It
 may be cited, however, for its persuasive value consistent with Fed. R. App. P. 32.1
 and 10th Cir. R. 32.1.
Appellate Case: 23-2112    Document: 010111000263        Date Filed: 02/14/2024      Page: 2

 United States. Records showed he had been deported several years earlier. He was

 indicted for illegally reentering the United States. See 8 U.S.C. § 1326(a), (b).

       Mr. Saucedo-Saucedo moved to dismiss the indictment. His motion focused

 on the Final Administrative Removal Order from years earlier that had ordered his

 first deportation. He pointed out that the order contained a typed name rather than a

 handwritten signature of an authorized official. He argued the omission of a

 handwritten signature rendered the order “nonexistent.” Aplt. App. at 11.

       To raise a collateral attack challenging the “validity” of an underlying

 deportation order, an illegal-reentry defendant must satisfy three conditions,

 § 1326(d),1 which Mr. Saucedo-Saucedo conceded he could not meet. But he argued

 he did not need to meet them because a collateral attack requires a deportation order,

 and no such order existed in his case because the document purporting to be his

 deportation order contained only a typed name on the signature line.

       The district court rejected Mr. Saucedo-Saucedo’s argument for two reasons.

 First, the court concluded that he failed to show that a missing signature means

 the deportation order did not exist. Second, it concluded that the motion to

 dismiss raised a collateral attack, which doomed the motion because

       1
         The defendant must show that (1) he or she exhausted any available
 administrative remedies, (2) the order came out of deportation proceedings that
 improperly deprived the defendant of an opportunity for judicial review, and (3) “the
 entry of the order was fundamentally unfair.” § 1326(d).

                                            2
Appellate Case: 23-2112     Document: 010111000263       Date Filed: 02/14/2024    Page: 3

 Mr. Saucedo-Saucedo could not satisfy the three statutory conditions. The court thus

 denied the motion to dismiss.

        Mr. Saucedo-Saucedo entered a conditional plea, reserving the right to appeal

 the denial of his motion to dismiss. He now appeals.

                                       II. DISCUSSION

        This appeal turns on whether Mr. Saucedo-Saucedo’s motion to dismiss raised

 a collateral attack under § 1326(d), an issue of statutory interpretation that we review

 de novo. See United States v. Ambort, 405 F.3d 1109, 1116 (10th Cir. 2005).

        Mr. Saucedo-Saucedo maintains that his motion to dismiss was not a collateral

 attack against his original deportation order because it called into question the order’s

 existence rather than its validity.

        This argument ignores the plain meaning of “validity.” “Valid” means, as

 relevant here, “[l]egally sufficient.” Valid, Black’s Law Dictionary (11th ed. 2019).

 When Mr. Saucedo-Saucedo argued that his deportation order lacked a necessary

 signature, he challenged the order’s legal sufficiency—its validity.

        Mr. Saucedo-Saucedo offers no authority suggesting that courts should treat a

 defective document as nonexistent rather than invalid, or that doing so would mean

 that a challenge to the document is not a collateral attack.2 “When a challenge to

 an order takes place in a separate proceeding that has an independent purpose,

        2
          We need not (and do not) decide whether the lack of a handwritten signature
 made Mr. Saucedo-Saucedo’s deportation order defective. It is enough to conclude
 that his argument on that point was a collateral attack.

                                             3
Appellate Case: 23-2112     Document: 010111000263        Date Filed: 02/14/2024      Page: 4

 such as a later criminal prosecution, it is a collateral attack.” United States v.

 Palomar-Santiago, 593 U.S. 321, 328 (2021) (quotations omitted). That is exactly

 the type of challenge Mr. Saucedo-Saucedo raised in his motion to dismiss.

                                   III. CONCLUSION

       The district court correctly concluded that Mr. Saucedo-Saucedo’s motion to

 dismiss presented a collateral attack against his deportation order and that he failed to

 satisfy the conditions in § 1326(d). We therefore affirm the district court’s order.

                                              Entered for the Court

                                              Scott M. Matheson, Jr.
                                              Circuit Judge

                                             4