United States v. Lopez-Garcia, 565 F.3d 1306 (11th Cir. 2009)
The defendant was convicted of being unlawfully found in the United States after having been previously removed and deported.
The defendant was pulled over for violating a traffic law in an area well-known for narcotics activity, after an officer observed his car stopped in the roadway and someone leaning into the passenger window. When asked for his driver’s license, the defendant showed the officer a Mexican license and said he had resided in the U.S. for several years. The defendant consented to the search of his car and the officer found a bulb-shaped glass tube containing a white residue believed to be methamphetamine.
He was arrested for possession and booked, and an ICE agent assigned to the jail performed a preliminary computer search where he learned that the defendant was born outside of the U.S. The ICE agent told the defendant that his purpose was to determine his immigration status. After this meeting, the agent received the Immigration Action Query that was run as part of the jail’s ordinary booking procedure, which indicated that the defendant had been deported, removed, or excluded in 2003 and no record of a legal entry was found.
At the second meeting, the agent read the defendant his Miranda warnings in Spanish from a standardized form which the defendant signed. The agent questioned the defendant in Spanish for about ten minutes and gave the defendant a copy of all the questions and answers, which he again willingly signed.
The defendant was indicted on federal charges of having been unlawfully found in the U.S. after having been previously removed and deported. The defendant moved to suppress the statements made to the ICE agent regarding his immigration status and the documentary evidence obtained. A magistrate judge held an evidentiary hearing and issued and R&R concluding that the arresting officer violated the Fourth Amendment when he stopped the defendant’s vehicle because he did not have either probable cause or reasonable suspicion. The judge then recommended that the evidence obtained at the scene of the arrest be suppressed. However, the R&R concluded that the defendants subsequent statements and documentary evidence should not be suppressed.
The officer had reasonable suspicion that defendant was engaged in hand-to-hand drug transaction and had probable cause to arrest defendant for possession of methamphetamine.
The District court held that officer’s suspicion was supported by several articulable facts including the location of the vehicle, physically, and in a high-crime area, an unknown individual leaning into the window, and the defendant leaving the scene once he noticed the officer. Furthermore, based on the substance and paraphernalia recovered from the consensual search, the officer reasonable believed that the defendant was in possession of methamphetamine.
The District court correctly concluded that the statements made to ICE agent were too removed from arrest to have suffered any taint.
Since the defendant’s seizure and arrest were not found to be unconstitutional , the fruit of the poisonous tree argument fails. In the alternative, even if the statements were tainted, they were too attenuated from the arrest to be regarded as fruit of the poisonous tree: the statements were made the day after the arrest; the arrest and questioning were done by two different individuals with two different objectives-immigration status and suspected drug activity; and neither the stop of the vehicle nor the immigration inquiry were made with an ulterior motive to prosecute the defendant for being illegally in the U.S.
The District court did not err in imposing the Guideline’s sixteen offense-level enhancement.
The defendant, prior to his removal, had a conviction for a felony firearms offense in Georgia, which, he argues, does not fall within the Guidelines 2L1.2 definition. The Court of Appeals found that the prior conviction met the Guidelines definition; and based on the facts set forth in the PSI, the District court correctly concluded that the defendant’s conduct from the previous conviction would have constituted a violation of Section 924(c) and therefore, the court was correct to impose the sixteen offense-level enhancement.
