Ninth Circuit Overturns Immigrant Conviction Over 2 Agents' Ties to Racist Facebook Group
Updated
Updated · The New York Times · Sep 15
Ninth Circuit Overturns Immigrant Conviction Over 2 Agents' Ties to Racist Facebook Group
1 articles · Updated · The New York Times · Sep 15
Summary
A three-judge Ninth Circuit panel threw out Jaime Tovar-Duran’s illegal-entry conviction, saying prosecutors failed to disclose that two of the three Border Patrol agents who testified against him belonged to a secret Facebook group.
The court said that omission violated the government’s constitutional duty to share relevant evidence because the agents’ activity in the “I’m 10-15” group could show bias against noncitizens.
The panel sent the case back to a lower court to decide whether disclosure of the agents’ membership would have changed the guilty verdict in Tovar-Duran’s 2019 border-crossing case.
The Facebook group was exposed by ProPublica in July 2019 and later drew a congressional investigation; a CBP internal probe identified 70 current and former employees tied to offensive social media groups.