Ali v. Mukasey

• Decision Date: 04 April 2008
• Docket Number: No. 07-1970.,07-1970.
• Citation: 521 F.3d 737
• Parties: Ibrahim A. ALI, Petitioner, v. Michael B. MUKASEY, Attorney General of the United States, Respondent.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Seventh Circuit

521 F.3d 737

Ibrahim A. ALI, Petitioner, v. Michael B. MUKASEY, Attorney General of the United States, Respondent.

No. 07-1970.

United States Court of Appeals, Seventh Circuit.

Argued March 5, 2008.

Decided April 4, 2008.

Steven A. Morley (argued), Morley, Surin & Griffin, Philadelphia, PA, for Petitioner.

Jamie M. Dowd, Gjon Juncaj (argued), Department of Justice Civil Division, Immigration Litigation, Washington, DC, for Respondent.

Before EASTERBROOK, Chief Judge, and MANION and SYKES, Circuit Judges.

EASTERBROOK, Chief Judge.

Ibrahim Ali, a citizen of Jordan, lived in the United States for more than 20 years as a permanent resident alien. He might have become a citizen; his wife and children are citizens; but when he chose to remain an alien and commit a federal crime, he put his residence and his family life in jeopardy. His crime is selling firearms, without a license or required paperwork, to people not authorized to own them. The conviction is for conspiracy "to commit any offense against the United States, or to defraud the United States", in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 371. The statutes that the conspirators agreed to violate are 18 U.S.C. § 922(a)(1)(A) and § 924(a)(1). The immigration judge and Board of Immigration Appeals classified Ali's offense as one "involving moral turpitude", which foreclosed any opportunity for him to seek adjustment of status on the basis of his wife's petition.

Ali concedes that, because his offense is a firearms crime, it is an "aggravated felony" under 8 U.S.C. § 1227(a)(2)(A)(iii): That blocks most avenues of discretionary relief. The one that remains open is adjustment of status under 8 U.S.C. § 1255(A). Ali is eligible to seek adjustment of status only if he could be readmitted to the United States. His conviction makes him ineligible for admission, but he can seek a waiver of that ineligibility, see 8 U.S.C. § 1182(h) — unless his offense is a "crime involving moral turpitude." 8 U.S.C. § 1182(a)(2)(A). We are entitled to consider that subject notwithstanding the aggravated felony because the proper classification of an offense is an issue of law. See 8 U.S.C. § 1252(a)(2)(D). But "moral turpitude" is a notoriously plastic term — one so ambulatory that some Justices have thought it unconstitutionally vague, see Jordan v. DeGeorge, 341 U.S. 223, 71 S.Ct. 703, 95 L.Ed. 886 (1951) (holding the phrase constitutionally adequate, over three dissents). Neither the Criminal Code nor the Immigration and Nationality Act supplies a definition.

When Congress leaves an administrative agency with discretion to resolve a statutory ambiguity, judicial review is deferential. Chevron U.S.A. Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc., 467 U.S. 837, 104 S.Ct. 2778, 81 L.Ed.2d 694 (1984); United States v. Mead Corp., 533 U.S. 218, 121 S.Ct. 2164, 150 L.Ed.2d 292 (2001). That principle applies to immigration no less than to other subjects. INS v. Aguirre-Aguirre, 526 U.S. 415, 119 S.Ct. 1439, 143 L.Ed.2d 590 (1999). We have several times avoided deciding whether the agency's classification of a crime as one of "moral turpitude" is covered by Chevron. see, e.g., Garcia-Meza v. Mukasey, 516 F.3d 535 (7th Cir.2008); Wei Cong Mei v. Ashcroft, 393 F.3d 737, 739 (7th Cir.2004). There is little justification for keeping everyone on tenterhooks and requiring counsel to brief this issue over and over again. Mead holds that a delegation of authority to an agency by the enactment of a vague statute that the agency must administer confers interpretive latitude on the agency rather than the court (that's the meaning of Chevron), provided that the agency uses rulemaking or adjudication to exercise its discretion. "Crime involving moral turpitude" is an open-ended term; the Board and other immigration officials are both required and entitled to flesh out its meaning; and as the Board has done this through formal adjudication the agency is entitled to the respect afforded by the Chevron doctrine.

The Board gave two reasons for finding that Ali's crime is one of moral turpitude. One is well-founded in the Board's jurisprudence and thus has all the support that Chevron can afford. The other is not — and, as it was applied in this case by a single member of the Board and not based on a precedential opinion issued by a multi-member panel, it lacks that support.

We start with the weak reason. The Board stated that unlicensed commercial trafficking in firearms is morally reprehensible. That view is incompatible with the Board's own precedents, which distinguish between acts that are seen as ethically wrong without any need for legal prohibition (acts wrong in themselves, or malum in se), and those that are ethically neutral and forbidden only by positive enactment (acts wrong because they are so decreed, or malum prohibitum). The Board has held that acts that are wrong in themselves, but not those forbidden only by positive enactment, are treated as crimes of moral turpitude. See Matter of L-V-C-, 22 I. & N. Dec. 594, 604 (1999); Matter of Serna, 20 I. & N. Dec. 579 (1992). licensing and form-filing requirements are in the category of malum prohibitum.

The single member speaking for the Board wrote that firearms licenses are different, because guns "require a license due to their inherent potential risk to the public welfare". That reflects ignorance of this nation's history. Licensing of dealers (and users) of firearms is a recent development; the first version of what is now § 922 and § 924 was not enacted until 1968; there is nothing inevitable about the current rules. Guns are dangerous, but the choice between licensing (a form of limited control before the fact) and punishment for misuse of firearms is not ah obvious one. Knives and other blade weapons are not licensed; their misuse is controlled through sanctions after the fact, which deter future wrongdoing. There are open questions, reflected in Parker v. District of Columbia, 478 F.3d 370 (D.C.Cir. 2007), cert. granted under the name District of Columbia v. Heller, ___ U.S. ___, 128 S.Ct. 645, 169 L.Ed.2d 417 (2007) (argued March 18, 2008), about the extent to which the Constitution's second amendment allows the national government to regulate firearms. One reason why many firearms-control statutes require proof that the accused knew about the law's requirements is precisely that any complex licensing system has unexpected and counterintuitive applications, which people cannot discover by consulting a moral compass. See Staples v. United States, 511 U.S. 600, 114 S.Ct. 1793, 128 L.Ed.2d 608 (1994).

The Board's existing precedents link "moral turpitude" to acts wrong in themselves — acts that, as Matter of Franklin, 20 I. & N. Dec. 867 (1994), put it, are base or vile, or display indifference to ethical concerns. Doubtless some unlicensed sales of firearms meet that condition. Think of sales to known terrorists or gangsters. But other licensing and documentation offenses pose low risks, see Article II Gun Shop, Inc. v. Gonzales, 441 F.3d 492 (7th Cir.2006), while still others are ambiguous. If all firearms-licensing offenses are to be moved to the "moral turpitude" category, that must be done by the Board as a whole after full deliberation.

The Board was on stronger ground, however, in treating Ali's offense as a species of fraud, which has long been seen as a crime of moral turpitude. See Jordan, 341 U.S. at 227-28, 232, 71 S.Ct. 703; Palmer v. INS, 4 F.3d 482, 485 n. 6 (7th cir.1993); Matter of Kochlani, 24 I. & N. Dec. 128, 130-31 (2007) (reaffirming the Board's precedents on this issue). Ali does not deny that, if his conviction is for fraud, then he is ineligible for discretionary relief. But he insists that unlicensed dealing in firearms does not entail fraud. If his conviction were under 18 U.S.C. § 924(a)(1)(D), as he supposes, Ali might have a point — Bryan v. United States, 524 U.S. 184, 118 S.Ct. 1939, 141 L.Ed.2d 197 (1998), on which the agency's brief relies, has nothing to do with moral turpitude — but the actual offense of conviction is 18 U.S.C. § 371. That crime may be committed in either of two ways: conspiracy to commit some other federal crime, or conspiracy to defraud the United States. The IJ and Board concluded that Ali's violation of § 371 entailed fraud (implying that the subsection of § 924 underlying the crime was § 924(a)(1)(A)). And with good reason. The judgment of conviction describes the crime as "[c]onspiracy to defraud the united states." The presentence report adds: "it was further part of the conspiracy that the defendants misrepresented, concealed and hid, and caused to be misrepresented[,] concealed and hidden, the purpose of and the acts done in furtherance of the conspiracy". The presentence report also stated that Ali and his confederates sold the guns to someone who, they believed, would resell them to known thugs (members of the Latin Kings street gang) in exchange for cocaine.

Ali sees the Board's use of the presentence report as his opening. Several opinions of this court state that immigration officials must stick to the indictment and record of conviction when using an alien's convictions as the basis of removal. See, e.g., Hashish v. Gonzales, 442 F.3d 572, 575 (7th Cir.2006); Padilla v. Gonzales, 397 F.3d 1016, 1019 (7th Cir.2005). The presentence report summarizes information from the prosecutor, from witnesses, and from the defendant's own mouth. Ali maintains that its contents must be ignored when classifying an offense for immigration purposes.

Our decisions in Hashish, Padilla, and similar cases apply to immigration law the approach that Taylor v. United States, 495 U.S. 575, 110 S.Ct. 2143, 109 L.Ed.2d 607 (1990), and Shepard v. United States, 544 U.S. 13, 125 S.Ct. 1254, 161 L.Ed.2d 205 (2005), adopt for recidivist enhancements in federal criminal prosecutions. The Supreme Court gave two principal reasons: in Taylor it stressed the benefits of simple application, so that...