Court Opinion

ID: 9842020
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-09-22 20:12:25.30428+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:09:08.750562
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Powell,
with whom Mu. Justice Rehnquist joins,
dissenting.
The Court today has construed a statute in a way that rewards falsehood and frustrates justice. The statute is § 106 (a) of the Immigration and Naturalization Act, 8 U. S. C. § 1105a (a) (1976 ed.), adopted in 1961 as part of a general revision of the statutory provisions governing judicial review of deportation orders. The general revision was designed to prevent repetitious litigation of frivolous claims, and “dilatory tactics” used to forestall deportation, by eliminating in most instances any review by district courts of deportation decisions. Foti v. INS, 375 U. S. 217, 224-225 (1963).1
*762The general rule under § 106 (a) leaves deportation matters largely to administrative proceedings, subject to review by a court of appeals to ensure that the administrative decision is supported by “reasonable, substantial, and probative evidence on the record considered as a whole.” 8 TJ. S. C. § 1105 (a) (4) (1976 ed.). Section 106 (a) (5), quoted ante, at 751-752, n. 2, provides a narrow exception to the general rule when the deportation proceeding involves a person claiming to be a national of the United-States. In such a proceeding, § 106 (a)(5) requires a reviewing court of appeals to refer the case to a district court for a de novo trial when the claimant clears two hurdles: first he must show that his claim to United States citizenship is not “frivolous,” and then that its resolution turns on “a genuine issue of material fact.” As indicated in the Court’s opinion, the statute is hardly a model of artful draftsmanship. Even so, it is unnecessary to construe it, as the Court does, to require a trial de novo in federal district court in response to any asserted claim to citizenship turning on questions of “credibility,” however farfetched.
There can be no case less deserving of further factual review than this one. Petitioner is an ex-convict, convicted of several crimes involving moral turpitude. He has told five different stories with respect to his nationality, inventing new fabrications to meet the Service’s evidence or whenever they served other purposes. See ante, at 759 n. 10. No one has believed his stories. Yet he has proved himself a master at exploiting the safeguards designed to vindicate bona fide- — ■ not specious — claims of citizenship. The Court’s holding totally frustrates the intent of Congress in enacting § 106 (a), in response to the “growing frequency of judicial actions being instituted by undesirable aliens whose cases have no legal basis or merit, but which are brought solely for the purpose of preventing or delaying indefinitely their deportation *763from this country.” H. R. Rep. No. 1086, 87th Cong., 1st Sess., 22-23 (1961). Rather than putting an end to this abuse of our generous procedures, the Court now concludes that petitioner is entitled to a de novo trial of a claim to citizenship so transparently false that none of the numerous judges who have passed on it believes it.
I
The Immigration Service claims that petitioner is an Italian by birth named Vincenzo Di Paola Pianetti, and that he is deportable because his most recent entry into the United States was fraudulent and because he has been convicted of crimes involving moral turpitude. The Service claims that petitioner last entered the United States in 1966, purporting to be a citizen of the United States and relying on the passport of Joseph Agosto. Petitioner claims he was born in Cleveland, Ohio, assigning various dates of birth from 1921 to 1927, and was named Joseph Agosto; that he was sent to Italy when he was 2 or 3 years old; that he lived there with his natural mother’s sister and her husband, who later “affiliated” him and gave him their name; and that he returned to the United States in 1951 or 1952. The issue ultimately is one of identity. If petitioner is “Agosto” rather than “Pianetti,” he is an American citizen. During the course of the instant proceedings, commenced in 1967, not a single administrative or judicial official has believed that petitioner is not the Italian-born Pianetti.
The proceedings in this case have been protracted. On September 5, 1967, the Service issued a show-cause order, and notice of hearing, seeking petitioner’s deportation. A full hearing was held before an Immigration Judge. The Service introduced documentary evidence demonstrating that petitioner was born, taken to a foundling home, and baptized in Agrigento, Italy, in 1927, and later was entrusted to the Pianettis. See ante, at 757. The Service also demonstrated *764that petitioner was married to an Italian woman in 1944 and had two daughters in Italy. At this first hearing, petitioner conceded that the documentary evidence pertained to him, but claimed that he really had been born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1921, and was named Joseph Agosto. Petitioner produced a marriage certificate showing that he was married in Alaska in 1953, and that he claimed at the time to be 32 years old and not previously married. Petitioner testified that he was sent to Italy when he “was 4 or,5, and that his belief that he was bom in Cleveland was based entirely on the birth certificate which an uncle sent him from the United States. The Service countered with documentary evidence that the birth certificate pertained to a Joseph Agosto who had been born in Cleveland in 1921 and died in Italy in 1951, and an affidavit from Joseph Agosto’s sister that petitioner falsely was using the identity of her deceased brother.
The Immigration Judge sustained the charge of the Service and entered a deportation order. He concluded that petitioner “presented no credible evidence to show that he is not the person [Pianetti] whom the Government claims him to be.” App. 14. On appeal, the Board of Immigration Appeals remanded the proceedings, “without reviewing the case on the merits,” for the Immigration Judge to consider petitioner's contention that he was nondeportable under § 241 (f) of the Act, 8 U. S. C. § 1251 (f) (1976 ed.), because of his marriage to an American citizen, Mary Marie Agosto.2
Following a second hearing, the Immigration Judge again found petitioner not a citizen, deportable (not only because he had entered the United States without inspection but also *765because he had been convicted of several crimes involving moral turpitude), and not entitled to relief under §241 (f). Again petitioner appealed to the Board of Immigration Appeals. On this appeal petitioner conceded that a Joseph Agosto died in Italy in 1951, but maintained that there were “two Joseph Agostos,” both bom in Cleveland of the same father but different mothers. Petitioner explained the fact of only one birth certificate by saying that his mother had been the father’s mistress and that the birth of the legitimate Joseph Agosto had not been recorded. The Board again declined to reach the merits of petitioner’s claim to citizenship and remanded for consideration of “forgiveness” relief under §241 (f).
It was not until the third hearing in 1971 that petitioner produced three witnesses, the couple who adopted him in Italy and his supposed half-brother from Ohio, who testified in support of petitioner’s claim to citizenship. Petitioner abandoned his other stories of birth in 1921 or 1927, and maintained that he was born in Cleveland in 1924, the son of the father of the Joseph Agosto who was born in 1921. On April 11,1973, the Immigration Judge filed an exhaustive opinion concluding that all of petitioner’s various and contradictory stories were fabrications. App. 23-59. The opinion characterized petitioner as having had, since “he was sixteen years of age, ... a record of deceit, double-dealing and subterfuge.” Id., at 32. The Board of Immigration Appeals affirmed. In the context of affirming the denial of discretionary relief from deportation, it observed that petitioner “knowingly gave false testimony before the immigration judge; his claim to citizenship has been knowingly false since its inception.” Pet. for Cert. xii.
Having finally exhausted his administrative remedies, petitioner appealed to the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. That court issued its memorandum decision on January 24, 1977, and sustained the deportation decision, say*766ing: “The evidence presented to the immigration judge does not disclose a colorable claim to United States nationality; nor does it meet the standard set forth in Kessler v. Strecker, 307 U. S. 22, 35 (1939)Id., at ii.
We granted certiorari on October 17) 1977. 434 U. S. 901. Today the Court hands down a decision entitling petitioner to continue his 11-year saga, commencing with a trial de novo in a district court.
II
The first flaw in the Court’s reasoning is that it reads out of the statute the threshold requirement that the claim to United States nationality not be “frivolous.” The Court muses in a footnote, without support, that “ [t] he 'frivolousness’ standard apparently refers to the merits of the legal theory underlying the citizenship claim,” ante, at 754 n. 4, and therefore has been satisfied in this case because petitioner’s theory of citizenship — that he was bom in this country — is not frivolous.
Neither the language of the statute nor its legislative history sheds any helpful light on the intended meaning of the term “frivolous” for purposes of this statute.3 The term may well refer in some instances to the underlying legal theory of a claim. But to say that this is the exclusive meaning is virtually to read the term out of the statute. If all that is required for a claim to be considered nonfrivolous is that the alleged alien maintain that he was bom in this country, patently frivolous claims will pass the first threshold of the statute.4 If Congress thought that every claim to birth *767in this country, however tenuous, merited judicial trial rather than judicial review, one would assume it would have so provided rather than create a dual system of de novo fact-finding by both administrative and judicial proceedings. In addition, the legal theory underlying any claim to citizenship almost always will be that the purported citizen was born or naturalized in the United States. According to the Court’s theory, therefore, the underlying legal theory of a claim to citizenship rarely will be deemed “frivolous.”
We normally construe statutes to give meaning to each of their components. I read Congress’ intent to have been that the courts of appeals must examine the administrative record to determine whether a claim to citizenship is frivolous for any reason.5 And it would be difficult to find a more frivolous claim to citizenship than this one.6
Ill
Assuming, arguendo, that petitioner’s claim is not frivolous, the Court of Appeals was required to transfer the case to a *768district court for a de novo hearing only if it concluded that a “genuine issue of material fact” existed. The Court today, applying the standard governing summary judgment in the federal courts, concludes that a genuine issue of material fact exists here because “the citizenship claim is supported by the testimony of three witnesses whose story, while highly unusual, certainly cannot be rejected as a matter of law.” Ante, at 760. The fallacy in this holding is twofold. First, it applies an erroneous standard. The Court assumes that Congress meant to import the summary judgment standard into an entirely different statutory scheme, simply because the same words appear in both contexts. While this is a superficially appealing approach, it abdicates our responsibility to construe the statute in light of its origin and purpose. The second flaw in the Court’s holding lies in its incorrect application of the summary judgment standard itself.
A
Section 106 (a) (5) apparently was enacted in order to satisfy the constitutional requirement, first enunciated in Ng Fung Ho v. White, 259 U. S. 276 (1922), that a resident who claims to be a United States citizen and supports the claim with the requisite quantum of proof is entitled to a judicial determination of his claim to citizenship. Id., at 282-285; see H. R. Rep. No, 1086, 87th Cong., 1st Sess., 29 (1961). The Court held that two of the petitioners in Ng Fung Ho were entitled to a de novo judicial determination of their citizenship claim because they “supported the claim by evidence sufficient, if believed, to entitle them to a finding of citizenship.” 7 259 U. S., at 282.
*769The standard of proof required by Ng Fung Ho for a judicial hearing was restated in two later cases, both decided before the enactment of § 106 (a)(5). In United States ex rel. Bilokumsky v. Tod, 263 U. S. 149 (1923) — which, like Ng Fung Ho, was written by Mr. Justice Brandéis — no claim to citizenship had been made. The Court observed, however, that “[i]f, in the deportation proceedings, Bilo-kumsky had claimed that he was a citizen and had supported the claim by substantial evidence, he would have been entitled to have his status finally determined by a judicial, as distinguished from an executive, tribunal.” 263 U. S., at 152 (citing Ng Fung Ho, supra) (emphasis supplied). In Kessler v. Strecker, 307 U. S. 22, 34-35 (1939), the Court again observed, citing Bilokumsky, that an alien is entitled to a trial de novo on a claim of citizenship if supported by “substantial evidence.” It is clear, therefore, that the constitutional requirement of a de novo judicial hearing is triggered only if the person claiming citizenship provides some substantial evidentiary support for his claim.
The Court’s conclusion that Congress intended to set a lower standard in § 106 (a) (5) is not supported by the legislative history. The Court acknowledges but disregards the fact that the House Reports antedating enactment of § 106 (a) (5) contain repeated references to “substantial” and “genuine” claims to citizenship. See ante, at 755; see also H. R. Rep. No. 1086, supra, at 28; H. R. Rep. No. 565, 87th Cong., *7701st Sess., 13, 15 (1961). In each of these Reports the reference to “a substantial claim of TJ. S. nationality” immediately precedes the observation that the statute was meant to satisfy the constitutional requirement articulated in Ng Fung Ho.
In the face of this unequivocal evidence of legislative intent, the Court errs in concluding that Congress meant to depart from the evidentiary standard stated in Ng Fung Ho, as interpreted in Bilokumsky and Kessler. The Court then compounds its error by holding that § 106 (a) (5) places a court of appeals, in reviewing a decision of the Board of Immigration Appeals, in the position of a district court ruling upon a motion for summary judgment at the outset of a trial. Fed. Rule Civ. Proc. 56 (c). Although there is congruity in the “genuine issue of material fact” language, found in both § 106 (a) (5) and Rule 56 (c), there is a controlling difference in the settings in which this language is used.
In the usual civil trial, the summary judgment motion is-entertained before any hearing has taken place. If sustained, it forecloses all opportunity for the opposing party to present his case before the finder of fact. Subject to appeal, a decision in favor of the movant in effect deprives his opponent of a trial on the facts. The situation to which § 106 (a) (5) applies simply is not comparable. That section is part of an elaborate administrative procedure in which a claimant may present fully his evidence to an Immigration Judge and. then have it reviewed by the Board of Immigration Appeals. There is no summary- judgment procedure under the Act and-, consequently, no danger that a claimant will be denied a full evidentiary hearing. In this respect, the standard contained in § 106 (a) (5) is more like the standard governing directed verdicts, Fed. Rule Civ. Pr'oc. 50, than summary .judgments.8
*771Although the Court of Appeals in this case itself did not observe the witnesses who testified on petitioner’s behalf, it was not required to ignore completely the unequivocal opinion of the Immigration Judge that petitioner’s witnesses had been “coached as to their testimony,” Pet. for Cert, viii; see App. 41, and that their stories were fabrications. ' Even if the Court of Appeals was not in as good a position to judge these matters as a judge ruling on a motion for directed verdict, neither was it as constricted as a judge ruling on a motion for summary judgment. As both motions are governed by the “genuine issue of material fact” standard, there is no reason to adopt the more restrictive but less appropriate analogy.9
This case illustrates forcefully the inappropriateness of the summary judgment analogy. Petitioner has had three evi-dentiary hearings before an Immigration Judge, three appellate reviews by the Board of Immigration Appeals, and one review *772each by the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and the United States Supreme Court. One normally would expect that at the end of this elaborate sequence of hearings and reviews, the case would be concluded. Instead, the Court launches petitioner’s litigation anew, bowing to a form of words rather than the substance of justice. All that has occurred — the entire sequence of eight proceedings — is merely prologue. Petitioner’s case now starts afresh in a district court in the same way that any civil litigation would commence. He is free to change his testimony- — again—and to round up new witnesses who will swear to it. If he loses once more, he will have an appeal as of right to the Court of Appeals; from there, he may file another petition for certio-rari. This additional round of proceedings probably will take several years. Meanwhile, petitioner will continue to enjoy the privileges of American citizenship that he has consistently abused.
B
Even if one assumes with the Court that the summary judgment analogy is appropriate, today’s decision still is untenable. Under Rule 56 (c) itself, there must be a degree of substantiality to the evidence proffered in opposition to a summary judgment motion if the motion is to be defeated. See Firemen’s Mutual Ins. Co. v. Aponaug Mfg. Co., 149 F. 2d 359, 362 (CA5 1945); Whitaker v. Coleman, 115 F. 2d 305, 306 (CA5 1940); 10 C. Wright & A. Miller, Federal Practice & Procedure §2725, p. 512 (1973); 6 J. Moore, Federal Practice ¶ 56.15 [4], p. 56-521 (2d ed. 1976). See also Maroon v. Immigration & Naturalization Service, 364 F. 2d 982, 989 (CA8 1966). A court never is required to accept evidence that is inherently incredible or “ Too incredible to be accepted by reasonable minds.’ ”10 6 Moore, supra, at 56-621. *773I believe petitioner’s evidence reasonably cannot be viewed in any other light.11
In concluding that there is a “genuine issue of material fact” presented on this record, under the standard applicable to a summary judgment motion, the Court relies primarily on the testimony of petitioner’s adoptive parents and supposed half brother, presented for the first time at petitioner’s third hearing before the Immigration Judge. In effect, the Court applies the summary judgment standard as if the only testimony on the record were that adduced at the third hearing. But if the summary judgment standard is to be applied, it is necessary to view the evidence submitted by petitioner in its totality — as if petitioner, in contesting a summary judgment motion, had submitted three sets of depositions containing precisely the same evidence presented by him at the three administrative hearings. A district court then would be confronted with three significantly different stories, each sworn to by petitioner, one belatedly corroborated by his coached kinsmen, and all of them contradicted by authenticated documentary evidence. I doubt that any district court would find petitioner’s evidence sufficient, viewed in its totality, to defeat a motion for summary judgment.
*774IV
However one may read the unclear language of § 106 (a)(5), it is at least clear that Congress did not intend duplicate judicial proceedings to follow administrative proceedings simply upon demand. If ‘all that § 106 (a) (5) requires is a swearing contest — even when the Government’s case is predicated on documents whose authenticity is uncontested — then every subject of deportation proceedings has it within his power to circumvent the obvious intention of the statutory scheme to minimize dilatory tactics by deportable aliens. The Court today has opened wide this inviting door.

 [B]y eliminating review in the district courts, the bill [was intended to] obviate one of the primary causes of delay in the final determination of all questions which may arise in a deportation proceeding.” 104 Cong. *762Rec. 17173 (1958) (remarks of Rep. Walter), quoted in Foti v. INS, 375 U. S., at 225 n. 11.

 On June 3, 1968, in connection with a friendly suit to have Mary Marie Agosto declared his legal wife, petitioner executed an affidavit which contradicted the story told at the first deportation hearing. The affidavit stated that petitioner was bom in 1927, and therefore was only 17 when he married his Italian wife in 1944. This would have rendered his first marriage invalid and would have validated his American marriage.

 The origin of the term in this context seems to have been Ng Fung Ho v. White, 259 U. S. 276 (1922), where the Court articulated the constitutional requirement of a judicial hearing when the petitioner “claims citizenship and makes a showing that his claim is not frivolous . . . .” Id., at 284. The threshold requirement that the claim not be frivolous was absent from one of the earlier drafts of § 106 (a) (5). See H. R. Rep. No. 2478, 85th Cong., 2d Sess., 1 (1958).

 Petitioner himself does not argue that a “frivolous” claim to citizenship can only be one whose underlying legal theory is frivolous. Petitioner’s *767counsel conceded before us that if there were uncontested documentary evidence of birth in Italy and only the alien’s sworn statement that he was born in the United States, “that would be a frivolous claim because [the hypothetical case] is really a bare assertion of citizenship without any evidentiary support at all.” Tr. of Oral Arg. 10.

 The courts of appeals are accustomed to determining whether in forma pauperis appeals from denials of habeas corpus petitions are “frivolous,” and therefore warrant dismissal, under 28 U. S. C. § 1915 (d). Whether such an appeal is considered “frivolous” may depend on either the legal theory or the facts of the case.

 In Maroon v. Immigration & Naturalization Service, 364 F. 2d 982 (CA8 1966), the alleged alien — somewhat like petitioner here — changed his story between the deportation proceedings and judicial review, in the face of solid contrary documentation offered by the Service. The Court of Appeals concluded: “In this situation, petitioner’s present claim to be a national of the United States, wholly unsupported by any substantial evidence whatever, and utterly inconsistent with the documents admittedly executed by him, would appear to be frivolous.” Id., at 989 (emphasis supplied).

 In Ng Fung Ho, two of the petitioners’ claims of citizenship apparently were not contradicted by independent evidence presented by the Government. Rather, the petitioners had. entered the United States lawfully, as the foreign-bom sons of a naturalized United States citizen and therefore as citizens themselves, and had been issued “certificates of identity.” Later, when immigration officials came to suspect perjury in the earlier *769proceedings, they sought to deport the petitioners. The petitioners argued in this Court that the immigration authorities had not presented any “real substantial evidence to support them in attempting ... to set aside the former finding of American citizenship. . . .” Brief for Petitioners in Ng Fung Ho v. White, O. T. 1921, No. 176, p. 33. Thus the determination of citizenship in Ng Fung Ho depended entirely on whether the evidence of the petitioners was believed by the factfinder or disbelieved because of the Service’s attempt to discredit it. Perhaps this explains the Court’s use of the “sufficient, if believed” language.

 When a party moves for a directed verdict, he does so after the evidence is in. This is comparable to the situation confronting a court of appeals in a case like this. The formulation of the standard governing summary judgments and directed verdicts is the same with respect to *771the “genuine issue” rule: “Both motions . . . call upon the court to make basically the same determination — that there is no geninue issue of fact and that the moving party is entitled to prevail as a matter of law.” 10 C. Wright & A. Miller, Federal Practice & Procedure § 2713, p. 407 (1973). Yet a major difference between summary judgment and directed verdict is that credibility determinations may enter into the latter but not the former. Unlike a summary judgment motion, “a directed verdict motion typically would be made after the witness had testified and the court could take account of the possibility that he either could not be disbelieved or believed by the jury.” Id., at 406.

 In addition, the Court substitutes its “genuine issue” standard for that used even by some of the Courts of Appeals in cases cited by the Court with approval. For example, in Rassano v. Immigration & Naturalization Service, 377 F. 2d 971 (CA7 1967), the petitioner and three supporting witnesses testified that the petitoner’s father said he had been naturalized and that both father and son were citizens. They were unable to produce the naturalization papers or to testify that they had seen them. The court held that the evidence was insufficient to raise a genuine issue of material fact, in part because of the untrustworthiness of the testimony. While the Bassano court used the standard of “genuine issue of material fact,” in conformity with the statutory language, it surely did not use the sumipary judgment standard endorsed by the Court today.

 And while the facts must be viewed in the light most favorable to the party opposing summary judgment, this means no more than that *773“the party opposing a summary judgment motion is to be given the benefit of all reasonable doubts and inferences in determining whether a genuine issue exists that justifies proceeding to trial.” 10 Wright & Miller, supra, at 510 (emphasis supplied).

 The Board of Immigration Appeals did say: “It is not beyond the realm of possibility that [petitioner’s] claim to United States citizenship is legitimate.” Pet. for Cert. viii. But the rest of the Board’s statements place this one in perspective. Immediately following its acknowledgment that petitioner’s claim was not demonstrably impossible, the Board observed that it would have to accept a number of illogical and unrealistic propositions in order to accept petitioner’s most recent story. In essence, the Board made clear that the story could not be accepted by reasonable minds; and it concluded ultimately that petitioner’s claim to citizenship “[had] been knowingly false since its inception.” Id., at xii.