Sandoval v. Holder

• Decision Date: 14 June 2011
• Docket Number: No. 09–3600.,09–3600.
• Citation: 641 F.3d 982
• Parties: Alejandra SANDOVAL, Petitioner,v.Eric H. HOLDER, Jr., Attorney General of the United States, Respondent.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Eighth Circuit

641 F.3d 982

Alejandra SANDOVAL, Petitioner,

v.Eric H. HOLDER, Jr., Attorney General of the United States, Respondent.

No. 09–3600.

United States Court of Appeals, Eighth Circuit.

Submitted: Oct. 19, 2010.Filed: June 14, 2011.

Anna Marie Petosky, argued, Minneapolis, MN, Randall Tietjen, Minneapolis, MN, Benjamin Casper, West St. Paul, MN, and Sheila Stuhlman, St. Paul, MN, on the brief, for petitioner.Aliza Bessie Alyeshmerni, USDOJ, OIL, argued, Washington, DC, Benjamin J. Zeitlin, USDOJ, OIL, on the brief, Washington, DC, for respondent.Before RILEY, Chief Judge, BYE and MELLOY, Circuit Judges.BYE, Circuit Judge.

Alejandra Sandoval, a citizen of Mexico, contends section 212(a)(6)(C)(ii) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), which renders inadmissible any alien who makes a false claim to United States citizenship, should not apply to her because, at the time she made the misrepresentation, she was an unaccompanied minor. The immigration judge (IJ) accepted Sandoval's argument and granted her adjustment of status on the basis of her marriage to a United States citizen. The Board of Immigration Appeals reversed, pointing to the lack of authority for the IJ's actions yet refusing to enunciate the controlling standard. On the record before us, we cannot discern whether the Board rejected Sandoval's argument on a wholesale basis, refusing to exempt from the statute any minors no matter what the age, or whether the Board's analysis was more nuanced and hinged on certain factors that warranted the application of the statute in Sandoval's particular case. Because, as the old saying goes, it is better to light a candle than curse the darkness, and the Board must articulate a sufficient basis for its decision to enable meaningful review, SEC v. Chenery Corp., 332 U.S. 194, 196–97, 67 S.Ct. 1575, 91 L.Ed. 1995 (1947), we remand the matter to the Board with instructions to clarify the standard it uses in applying section 212(a)(6)(C)(ii) to unaccompanied minors and to articulate the reasons Sandoval deserves no relief under that standard.

I

Sandoval was born in 1981 in Mexico. Her mother died when Sandoval was only two, and she was raised by her paternal grandparents. When her grandfather died around her fifteenth birthday, her two older sisters, both United States citizens by birth, decided Sandoval should join them in the United States. Her sister Sandra arranged for Sandoval to cross the border in Tijuana. In the bygone days of lax border enforcement, Sandoval crossed the border easily, which she did by joining a group of Americans who were waived by without much scrutiny. Once in the United States, she settled with her sister Patricia in the Minneapolis area and started attending a local high school in the fall of 1996.

Sandoval found adjustment to her new life difficult. In the fall of the following year, she decided to take a break and visit her relatives in Mexico. On advice of an undocumented friend, she used her sister Sandra's birth certificate to obtain a Minnesota identification card. With the help from a boyfriend, she purchased a plane ticket to Mexico, also in Sandra's name. In late November of 1997, she flew to Mexico where she remained until January of 1998, at the cost of failing all her classes that semester.

As it turns out, returning to the United States was not as easy. On January 10, 1998, Sandoval boarded a flight from Guadalajara to Chicago, with a stopover in Dallas. When passing through the immigration counter at the Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport, she presented Sandra's birth certificate and her Minnesota ID card to the immigration officer. With Sandra being four years older, Sandoval's age according to the documents was twenty, whereas her real age was sixteen. Suspicious of the age discrepancy, the immigration officer referred Sandoval to the secondary inspection, where she was questioned in Spanish by Teresa Vega and two other inspectors. The stories diverge as to how quickly Sandoval confessed. While Sandoval maintains she burst into tears and revealed her identity virtually instantly, Vega insists the truth was harder to come by. According to Vega, Sandoval came clean only after inspectors had confronted her with some receipts bearing her real name and discovered her initials and date of birth engraved on the quinceañera ring she was wearing.

Voluntariness of Sandoval's confession exhausts the list of factual disagreements between the parties. Everyone agrees that, once the truth came out, Vega filled out Form I–213, Record of Deportable Alien, documenting the incident. Under the protocol in effect at the time for cases involving unaccompanied minors, Vega allowed Sandoval to withdraw her application for admission by filing Form I–275, Withdrawal of Application for Admission. As a result, Sandoval avoided the charges of misrepresentation and removal proceedings. With that, Sandoval was sent on her way to Mexico.

However, giving up was apparently not in the teenager's character. Mere days later, Sandoval made her way back to Minnesota with the help of a smuggler. Her life thereafter followed a normal progression: She stayed in the Minneapolis area, earned good grades in high school, eventually graduated, then got a job, then had a daughter and got married. Yet the 1997 airport incident came back to haunt her years later, when she applied for adjustment of status based on her marriage to a United States citizen.

The problem is that section 212(a)(6)(C)(ii) of the INA renders Sandoval permanently barred from admission into the country by virtue of having made a false claim to United States citizenship. See 8 U.S.C. § 1182(a)(6)(C)(ii)(I). On the basis of that provision, the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services denied Sandoval's application for adjustment of status and placed her in removal proceedings in February of 2004. ¹

During the proceedings before an Immigration Judge, Sandoval argued the permanent admissibility bar should not apply to unaccompanied minor children in the same way it applies to adults. She also alleged she timely retracted her claim to citizenship—particularly if her age is properly taken into account—in which case section 212(a)(6)(C)(ii) does not apply. The IJ was sympathetic to Sandoval's first argument and granted her application for adjustment of status. He was persuaded by the reasoning of the Supreme Court in Roper v. Simmons, 543 U.S. 551, 125 S.Ct. 1183, 161 L.Ed.2d 1 (2005), where the Court struck down the death penalty to punish conduct committed by a defendant during the age of minority. Characterizing the permanent bar to admissibility as the “immigration version of the death penalty,” the IJ read Roper to suggest that juveniles should be spared the application of the admissibility bar because they lack “sufficient maturity to understand the scope and ramifications of any such claim or misconduct on their part.”

The government appealed, and the Board reversed the IJ's ruling in an unpublished decision by a single member. The entire reasoning of the Board was encapsulated in one sentence: “We find no legal authority or support for the Immigration Judge's ‘bright line rule’ and a conclusion that persons under the age of 18 categorically lack sufficient maturity and mental capacity to falsely claim United States citizenship.” On remand, the Board instructed the IJ simply to determine “whether the facts of the case support a conclusion that the respondent is inadmissible as one falsely claiming United States citizenship.”

The IJ followed the Board's edict. After registering his disagreement with the Board's legal reasoning, he made a factual finding that Sandoval attempted to pass herself off as her sister and did not retract her misrepresentation in time to avoid the penalties under section 212(a)(6)(C)(ii). The IJ did not address Sandoval's argument regarding the effect of her unaccompanied minor status on the rules of timely retraction, apparently considering the point preempted by the Board's previous decision. In the end, the IJ denied Sandoval's application for adjustment of status and found her removable, but granted her request for voluntary departure.

Presented with the case a second time, the Board upheld the IJ's factual findings. This time, not unlike the first, the single Board member disposed of Sandoval's renewed legal argument insisting on the special treatment of unaccompanied minors in but one sentence. It construed the argument as a request for reconsideration and denied it, finding “no error of fact or law in our [previous] decision.” The present petition for review followed.

II

Some background is in order. Section 212(a)(6)(C)(ii) of the INA renders inadmissible “[a]ny alien who falsely represents, or has falsely represented, himself or herself to be a citizen of the United States for any purpose or benefit under this chapter ... or any other Federal or State law.” 8 U.S.C. § 1182(a)(6)(C)(ii)(I). The provision was added to the INA by the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA), Pub. L. 104–208, Div. C, Title II, § 344(a), 110 Stat. 3009–546 (1996), which Congress enacted in 1996 out of concern about proliferation of fraud in accessing various federal benefits restricted to United States citizens or certain eligible non-citizens. See H.R.Rep. No. 104–861, at 50 (1996); 142 Cong. Rec. S11,503–02 (daily ed. Sept. 27, 1996) (statement of Sen. Paul Coverdell). Section 212(a)(6)(C)(ii) dovetails to another part of the IIRIRA that established systems for verification of work authorization, Pub. L. 104–208, Div. C, Title IV, § 401–04, designed to prevent unauthorized employment and loss of jobs to noncitizens. See 142 Cong. Rec. S4,577–01 (daily ed. May 2, 1996) (statement of Sen. Simpson). In addition to the civil provision establishing inadmissibility of aliens who make false claims to citizenship, the IIRIRA punished the same conduct criminally. See Pub....