Court Opinion

ID: 9476545
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 05:58:33.478348+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:45:22.614983
License: Public Domain

PATRICK E. HIGGINBOTHAM, Circuit Judge,
specially concurring:
I join Judge Reavley’s opinion, but write separately to note my hesitation in the suggestion that an administrative warrant might properly issue on these facts.
First, it is not clear to me that the purpose of the checkpoint is administrative and not the enforcement of the criminal laws of the United States. It is true that a substantial percentage of the intercepted illegal aliens are not prosecuted, but the persons who transport them are frequently prosecuted and many illegal aliens are prosecuted if they are repeat offenders. Second, whatever the relevance in fourth amendment jurisprudence of the argument that the government has less restrictive alternatives, it is directly relevant to administrative warrants.
Of course, the Constitution is no straitjacket tying the hands of the United States and preventing it from protecting its borders. But while the difficulties that *874attend our common border with Mexico are enormous, it is by no means a static problem — to the contrary. Only recently Congress made illegal the employ of illegal aliens. Until this legislation, the effectiveness of which is not reflected in the data before us, we maintained the curiously ambivalent policy of simultaneously making entry illegal and tolerating the legality of the most powerful attractive force for illegal entry — a job in the United States.
The dissent argues forcefully for the reasonableness of the right of full search at this checkpoint. The data utilized, however, do not tell us whether the success of the checkpoint depended upon the full search rights the dissent would give as opposed to investigatory stops contemplated by United States v. Martinez-Fuerte, 428 U.S. 543, 96 S.Ct. 3074, 49 L.Ed.2d 1116 (1976). See also Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1, 88 S.Ct. 1868, 20 L.Ed.2d 889 (1968). While disclaiming labels, the dissent effectively suspends the operation of the fourth amendment and does so without the doctrinal justification of border searches. I find no precedent for that analysis, and I am not persuaded that the Supreme Court’s approval of a state rule allowing a search without probable cause of a probationer’s home or its approval of a warrantless inspection of an automobile junkyard are apposite. See Griffin v. Wisconsin, — U.S. -, 107 S.Ct. 3164, 97 L.Ed.2d 709 (1987); New York v. Burger, — U.S. -, 107 S.Ct. 2636, 96 L.Ed.2d 601 (1987).
The reasonableness of a search without a warrant must have a time, place, and situation dimension; while the dissent ably describes our present extraordinarily difficult immigration problems, the justification rests on a snapshot of ephemeral facts and is used to justify an open-ended suspension of the fourth amendment. The dissent cannot escape the brooding reality of accepting that every person traveling on an interstate highway of the United States, a major east-west artery to southern California, may be subjected to a full search at the sole discretion of a government agent without even articulable suspicion of wrongdoing. I respectfully disagree.
Perhaps administrative warrants will prove to offer the proper balance of these powerful competing interests. I reserve that judgment until we have the case. Perhaps the Supreme Court will balance in favor of a vehicular search for illegal aliens. But I will wait its reexamination of United States v. Ortiz, 422 U.S. 891, 95 S.Ct. 2585, 45 L.Ed.2d 623 (1975).