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A federal appeals court has upheld lower courts that found Miranda rights do not apply in civil immigration arrests, turning away a case filed on behalf of an illegal migrant.
According to The Center Square late last month, a three-judge panel of the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Miranda doesn’t apply to migrants arrested under a civil warrant, upholding a previous order to deport a Mexican citizen who claimed that he was forced into admitting his illegal statues under an administrative warrant.
In Miranda v. Arizona, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1966 that police and other law enforcement agencies could not use suspects’ statements against them while they were in custody unless they were first told of their rights against self-incrimination and to a defense attorney.
The “Ninth Circuit panel affirmed earlier rulings by an immigration judge and the U.S. Board of Immigration Appeals by rejecting Jose Maria Zuniga De La Cruz’s appeal to the court,” The Center Square reported.
The court wrote: “The panel observed that this court has long held that the substantial distinctions between a civil deportation proceeding and a criminal trial make Miranda warnings inappropriate in the deportation context. Zuniga asked this court to forge an exception, arguing that because he was arrested under an administrative warrant, his un-Mirandized statements should have been excluded.
“The panel rejected that contention, explaining that Zuniga’s focus on the warrant was misplaced because it is the nature of the proceeding (criminal vs. civil), and not the nature of the arrest (warrantless vs. with a warrant) that is relevant,” the panel added in its ruling.
Zuniga was arrested through an administrative warrant, issued not by a judge as required for criminal arrest warrants, but by an Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) official who believed there was enough evidence to suggest he was in the country illegally. In 2018 as part of civil immigration proceedings, ICE detained Zuniga, who has lived in the United States since 2004.
Though all three judges agreed with the ruling, Circuit Judge Salvador Mendoza, appointed by President Biden, argued that “although Miranda applies only to criminal proceedings, he saw no reason not to inform noncitizens of their rights, observing that this court in a previous case had affirmed an injunction requiring immigration agents to inform noncitizens of their right to apply for political asylum and their right to counsel.”
The lead author of the opinion, Circuit Judge Daniel Bress — a Trump appointee — argued instead that there is no legal basis to create this new right for illegal migrants, writing that Miranda is “not authority for creating new versions of itself in the immigration context.”
Meanwhile, in September, a federal judge in Texas who previously ruled that the Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals program, nicknamed “DACA,” reaffirmed that ruling.
U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen ruled that a revised version of the program, which prevents the deportation of thousands of migrants brought illegally into the U.S. as children, also does not pass legal or constitutional muster more than a decade after then-President Barack Obama implemented the program via executive order after repeatedly claiming he had no authority as president to do so.
“Hanen said in his decision Wednesday that on July 16, 2021, the court vacated the DACA program created by the 2012 DACA Memorandum, which prohibited the U.S., its departments, agencies, officers, agents and employees from granting new DACA applications and administering the program,” Fox News reported at the time.
The ruling was eventually reaffirmed by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans and then again by him.
“That program is vacated, and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is enjoined from implementing Final Rule DACA until a further order of the Court, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, or the Supreme Court of the United States,” Hanen noted in his ruling.
