Calderon-Minchola v. Attorney General , 258 F. App'x 425 ( 2007 )

Opinions of the United
2007 Decisions States Court of Appeals
for the Third Circuit
12-12-2007
Calderon-Minchola v. Atty Gen USA
Precedential or Non-Precedential: Non-Precedential
Docket No. 06-3056
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NOT PRECEDENTIAL
UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS
FOR THE THIRD CIRCUIT
__________
No. 06-3056
__________
DENIS SEGUNDO CALDERON-MINCHOLA,
Petitioner,
v.
ATTORNEY GENERAL OF THE
UNITED STATES,
Respondent.
____________
On Petition for Review from an
Order of the Board of Immigration Appeals
(Board No. A37-919-176)
Immigration Judge: Honorable Walter Durling
____________
Submitted Under Third Circuit LAR 34.1(a)
December 10, 2007
Before: McKEE, CHAGARES and HARDIMAN, Circuit Judges.
(Filed: December 12, 2007)
____________
OPINION OF THE COURT
____________
HARDIMAN, Circuit Judge.
Denis Segundo Calderon-Minchola (Calderon) petitions for review of an order of
the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA), which affirmed an order of an Immigration
Judge (IJ) finding him removable and pretermitting his application for a waiver of
inadmissibility under former § 212(c) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA). For
the reasons set forth below, the petition will be denied.
I.
Calderon is a 38 year-old citizen of Peru who became a lawful permanent resident
of the United States in 1983. In 1997, Calderon was tried and convicted in the Court of
Common Pleas of Philadelphia County of aggravated assault, criminal conspiracy,
possessing instruments of a crime, simple assault, and recklessly endangering another
person. He was sentenced to not less than 2 ½ years to no more than 10 years
incarceration.
In 2005, Calderon was detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement
while reporting on parole and served with a Notice to Appear charging him with being
removable as an aggravated felon who committed a crime of violence under 8 U.S.C.
§ 1101(a)(43)(F). The IJ sustained the charge, finding that Calderon’s aggravated assault
conviction constituted a “crime of violence” under the statute. The IJ also pretermitted
Calderon’s request for a waiver of inadmissibility under former § 212(c), finding that
Calderon was statutorily ineligible. The BIA affirmed the IJ, and Calderon now appeals
to this Court.
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II.
Former § 212(c) of the INA provided the Attorney General with discretion to
waive the exclusion of certain lawful permanent residents who sought reentry to the
United States after a temporary departure and were found excludable under one of the 33
grounds of exclusion set forth in § 212(a). Section 212(c) was repealed when the Illegal
Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA), Pub. L. No. 104-208
(1996) became law. Because the Supreme Court subsequently held that Congress did not
intend for IIRIRA to apply retroactively to lawful permanent residents who pleaded guilty
to crimes before the passage of IIRIRA, INS v. St. Cyr, 533 U.S. 289 (2001), the INS
permitted lawful permanent residents with convictions entered before April 1, 1997 to
apply for a § 212(c) waiver. See 8 C.F.R. pts. 1003, 1212, and 1240.
The plain language of § 212(c) did not affect lawful permanent residents who had
never left the country and were found deportable under one of the numerous grounds of
deportation listed in § 241 of the INA, and for many years the BIA refused to grant
§ 212(c) waivers to lawful permanent residents in deportation proceedings. See Matter of
Arias-Uribe, 13 I. & N. Dec. 696 (B.I.A. 1971). However, in Francis v. INS, 532 F.2d
268 (2d Cir. 1976), the Second Circuit found that the BIA’s rule violated the guarantee of
equal protection implicit in the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment, and held that
deportable lawful permanent residents who had not left the country are eligible for
§ 212(c) waivers to the same extent as those seeking to reenter the country. Id. at 272-73.
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In the wake of Francis, the BIA struggled to formulate an appropriate test for
determining whether a deportee was similarly situated to an excludee, but ultimately
settled upon a “comparable grounds” test in which it looked to whether the “ground of
deportation charged is also a ground of inadmissibility.” See, e.g., Matter of Wadud, 19 I.
& N. Dec. 182, 184 (B.I.A. 1984). In 2004, the BIA changed course somewhat,
promulgating a regulation making a lawful permanent resident ineligible for a § 212(c)
waiver if he or she is deportable “on a ground which does not have a statutory counterpart
in § 212 of the Act.” 8 C.F.R. § 1212.3(f)(5). This “statutory counterpart test” turns on
“whether Congress has employed similar language to describe substantially equivalent
categories of offenses.” In re Blake, 23 I. & N. Dec. 722 (B.I.A. 2005). Notably, the
BIA has expressly found that a lawful permanent resident, like Calderon, who is found
deportable for having committed an aggravated felony crime of violence, is not eligible to
apply for a § 212(c) waiver. In re Brieva-Perez, 23 I. & N. Dec. 766 (B.I.A. 2005). In
Brieva, the BIA rejected petitioner’s argument that his conviction for a crime of violence
had a statutory counterpart in § 212's ground of exclusion for crimes of moral turpitude,
noting the different language used to describe crimes of violence and crimes involving
moral turpitude and the “significant variance in the types of offenses covered by these
two provisions.” Id. at 773.
III.
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Calderon asserts two principal arguments on appeal. First, he submits that the
Blake-Brieva rule is inconsistent with past BIA precedent and creates the same “Equal
Protection conundrum” identified in Francis. Calderon argues that the BIA must instead
look to the underlying offense itself, not the statutory ground of removal actually charged,
to determine if it could have been addressed under a specific ground of exclusion.
Because his offense also could have subjected him to removal for having committed a
crime of moral turpitude, which does have a statutory counterpart in § 212, this approach
would make Calderon eligible for a waiver. Second, Calderon maintains that, even if the
Blake-Brieva rule is correct, the BIA misapplied it in concluding that the “crime of
violence” ground of removability has no statutory counterpart in § 212.
We recently rejected both of these arguments in Coroleo v. Gonzales, 476 F.3d
158 (3d Cir. 2007), which was decided after Calderon’s opening brief was filed. Like
Calderon, the petitioner in Coroleo was charged with being removable for having
committed a crime of violence and argued that he was eligible for a § 212 waiver because
his underlying offense, attempted murder, was also a crime of moral turpitude. We
disagreed, and instead endorsed the BIA's reasoning in Blake and Brieva, that “the
underlying crime for which [petitioner] was convicted plays no role” in determining
eligibility for a § 212(c) waiver. Id. at 168. Rather, once the government has
categorized the ground of removal, and that categorization has been sustained, the inquiry
“focuses on whether this statutory ground for removal is substantially equivalent to any
of the statutory grounds for exclusion in INA § 212(a).” Id. (emphasis in original). It is
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“irrelevant that [petitioner’s] conviction for attempted murder could have subjected him
to removal as an alien convicted of a crime of moral turpitude.” Id. We then proceeded
to apply the Blake-Brieva test and concluded that the “crime of violence” ground of
removal had no statutory counterpart in § 212, thus making the petitioner statutorily
ineligible to apply for a § 212(c) waiver. Id.
Calderon urges us to reconsider our holding in Coroleo, arguing that we
overlooked the substantial equal protection problem created by the BIA’s Blake-Brieva
approach. In support of this argument, Calderon has submitted the recent decision of the
Second Circuit in Blake v. Carbone, 489 F.3d 88 (2d Cir. 2007), in which the court
rejected the Blake-Brieva rule based upon “the equal protection principle articulated in
Francis” and held that a deportable lawful permanent resident with an aggravating felony
conviction is eligible for a § 212(c) waiver “if his or her particular aggravated felony
offense could form the basis of exclusion under § 212(a) as a crime of moral turpitude”
Id. at 104. As Congress “did not employ similar terms when writing the grounds of
exclusion and grounds of deportation because it had no need to,” the Second Circuit
found it was “an exercise in futility to search for similar language to gauge whether equal
protection is being afforded.” Id. at 102.
We are unpersuaded. Contrary to Calderon’s assertions, we did consider the equal
protection implications of the Blake-Brieva rule in Coroleo. Indeed, we noted that the
Ninth Circuit’s conclusion in Komarenko v. INS, 35 F.3d 432 (9th Cir. 1994), which we
adopted after discussing at length, “follows directly from the equal protection concerns
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that are the basis for the whole idea of a ‘statutory counterpart’” Coroleo, 476 F.3d at
165. These equal protection concerns require that statutory classifications that are
substantially identical be treated similarly, but do not require like treatment where the two
classifications are dissimilar. Id. (citing Komarenko, 35 F.3d at 435). We also joined the
Ninth Circuit in declining to adopt a factual approach to our equal protection analysis,
finding that such “judicial legislating” would overstep the judicial role in immigration
legislation and “interfere with the broad enforcement powers Congress has delegated to
the Attorney General.” Id. at 165-66 (quoting Komarenko, 35 F.3d at 435). We are
unmoved by the Second Circuit’s assertion that its holding in Blake is limited because it
has “neither made a § 212(c) waiver available to all deportees with an aggravated felony
conviction, nor put deportees in a better position than excludees.” Blake, 489 F.3d at 104.
Although this may be factually correct, the Second Circuit’s approach nevertheless
dramatically expands the scope of the Attorney General’s review. See Coroleo, 476 F.3d
at 165-66 (observing that a factual equal protection analysis would extend “discretionary
review to every ground for deportation that could constitute ‘the essential elements of a
crime involving moral turpitude,’”) (internal citation omitted). It also bears mentioning
that the Second Circuit’s holding is contrary to every other court of appeals to have
addressed the issue since the BIA announced the Blake-Brieva rule. See Kim v. Gonzales,
468 F.3d 58 (1st Cir. 2006); Sanchez v. Gonzales, 473 F.3d 133 (5th Cir. 2006); Valere v.
Gonzales, 473 F.3d 757 (7th Cir. 2007); Soriano v. Gonzales, 489 F.3d 909 (8th Cir.
2006) (per curiam); Abebe v. Gonzales, 493 F.3d 1092 (9th Cir. 2007).
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We are also unpersuaded by Calderon’s assertion that his “plain language
argument” regarding the divisibility of 18 U.S.C. § 16, which defines the term “crime of
violence,” distinguishes his case from Coroleo. The premise of this argument appears to
be that the petitioner in Blake committed a “crime of violence” as defined in 18 U.S.C.
§ 16(b). Calderon, however, committed a crime of violence as defined in 18 U.S.C.
§ 16(a), and he claims it was therefore improper for the BIA to rely upon Blake in finding
that § 16(a) had no statutory counterpart in § 212(a). Because, according to Calderon, the
proper inquiry under Blake-Brieva is whether all possible offenses under the statute in
question involve moral turpitude, and all offenses under § 16(a) would involve moral
turpitude, § 16(a) has a statutory counterpart in § 212(a) even though § 16(b) may not.
This “plain language” argument misstates the Blake-Brevia rule and is in fact
nothing more than a variation on Calderon’s assertion that we should examine the
underlying facts of his conviction. Moreover, Calderon’s proposed test would be unlikely
to yield the result he seeks because § 16(a) encompasses any offense “that has as an
element the use, attempted use, or threatened use of physical force against the person or
property of another.” 18 U.S.C. § 16(a). Thus, § 16(a) would appear to require none of
the vileness, depravity, or reprehensible acts deliberately committed that we have held are
characteristic of moral turpitude. See DeLeon-Reynoso v. Ashcroft, 293 F.3d 633 (3d Cir.
2002); Partyka v. Attorney General, 417 F.3d 408 (3d Cir. 2005).
IV.
For the foregoing reasons, we will deny Calderon’s petition for review.
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