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SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES
_________________
No. 16–309
_________________
DIVNA MASLENJAK, PETITIONER
v.UNITED
STATES
on writ of certiorari to the united states
court of appeals for the sixth circuit
[June 22, 2017]
Justice Kagan delivered the opinion of the
Court.
A federal statute, 18 U. S. C.
§1425(a), makes it a crime to “knowingly procure[ ], contrary
to law, the naturalization of any person.” And when someone is
convicted under §1425(a) of unlawfully procuring her
own
naturalization, her citizenship is automatically revoked. See 8
U. S. C. §1451(e). In this case, we consider what the
Government must prove to obtain such a conviction. We hold that the
Government must establish that an illegal act by the defendant
played some role in her acquisition of citizenship. When the
illegal act is a false statement, that means demonstrating that the
defendant lied about facts that would have mattered to an
immigration official, because they would have justified denying
naturalization or would predictably have led to other facts
warranting that result.
I
Petitioner Divna Maslenjak is an ethnic Serb
who re-sided in Bosnia during the 1990’s, when a civil war between
Serbs and Muslims divided the new country. In 1998, she and her
family (her husband Ratko Maslenjak and their two children) met
with an American immigration official to seek refugee status in the
United States. Interviewed under oath, Maslenjak explained that the
family feared persecution in Bosnia from both sides of the national
rift. Muslims, she said, would mistreat them because of their
ethnicity. And Serbs, she testified, would abuse them because her
husband had evaded service in the Bosnian Serb Army by absconding
to Serbia—where he remained hidden, apart from the family, for some
five years. See App. to Pet. for Cert. 58a–60a. Persuaded of the
Maslenjaks’ plight, American officials granted them refugee status,
and they immigrated to the United States in 2000.
Six years later, Maslenjak applied for
naturalization. Question 23 on the application form asked whether
she had ever given “false or misleading information” to a
government official while applying for an immigration benefit;
question 24 similarly asked whether she had ever “lied to a[ ]
government official to gain entry or admission into the United
States.”
Id., at 72a. Maslenjak answered “no” to both
questions, while swearing under oath that her replies were true.
Id., at 72a, 74a. She also swore that all her written
answers were true during a subsequent interview with an immigration
official. In August 2007, Maslenjak was naturalized as a U. S.
citizen.
But Maslenjak’s professions of honesty were
false: In fact, she had made up much of the story she told to
immigration officials when seeking refuge in this country. Her
fiction began to unravel at around the same time she applied for
citizenship. In 2006, immigration officials confronted Maslenjak’s
husband Ratko with records showing that he had not fled
conscription during the Bosnian civil war; rather, he had served as
an officer in the Bos-nian Serb Army. And not only that: He had
served in a brigade that participated in the Srebrenica massacre—a
slaughter of some 8,000 Bosnian Muslim civilians. Within a year,
the Government convicted Ratko on charges of making false
statements on immigration documents. The newly naturalized
Maslenjak attempted to prevent Ratko’s deportation. During
proceedings on that matter, Maslenjak admitted she had known all
along that Ratko spent the war years not secreted in Serbia but
fighting in Bosnia.
As a result, the Government charged Maslenjak
with knowingly “procur[ing], contrary to law, [her]
naturalization,” in violation of 18 U. S. C. §1425(a).
According to the Government’s theory, Maslenjak violated §1425(a)
because, in the course of procuring her naturalization, she broke
another law: 18 U. S. C. §1015(a), which prohibits
knowingly making a false statement under oath in a naturalization
proceeding. The false statements the Government invoked were
Maslenjak’s answers to questions 23 and 24 on the citizenship
application (stating that she had not lied in seeking refugee
status) and her corresponding statements in the citizenship
interview. Those statements, the Government argued to the District
Court, need not have affected the naturalization decision to
support a conviction under §1425(a). The court agreed: Over
Maslenjak’s objection, it instructed the jury that a conviction was
proper so long as the Government “prove[d] that one of the
defendant’s statements was false”—even if the statement was not
“material” and “did not influence the decision to approve [her]
naturalization.” App. to Pet. for Cert. 86a. The jury returned a
guilty verdict; and the District Court, based on that finding,
stripped Maslenjak of her citizenship. See 8 U. S. C.
§1451(e).
The United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth
Circuit affirmed the conviction. As relevant here, the Sixth
Circuit upheld the District Court’s instructions that Maslenjak’s
false statements need not have influenced the naturalization
decision. If, the Court of Appeals held, Maslenjak made false
statements violating §1015(a) and she procured naturalization, then
she also violated §1425(a)—irrespective of whether the false
statements played any role in her obtaining citizenship. See 821
F. 3d 675, 685–686 (2016). That decision created a conflict in
the Circuit Courts.[
1] We
granted certiorari to resolve it, 580 U. S. ___ (2017), and we
now vacate the Sixth Circuit’s judgment.
II
A
Section 1425(a), the parties agree, makes it a
crime to commit some other illegal act in connection with
naturalization. But the parties dispute the nature of the required
connection. Maslenjak argues that the relationship must be “causal”
in kind: A person “procures” her naturalization “contrary to law,”
she contends, only if a predicate crime in some way “contribut[ed]”
to her gaining citizenship. Brief for Petitioner 21. By contrast,
the Government proposes a basically chronological link: Section
1425(a), it urges, “punishes the commission of other violations of
law
in the course of procuring naturalization”—even if the
illegality could not have had any effect on the naturalization
decision. Brief for United States 14 (emphasis added). We conclude
that Maslenjak has the better of this argument.
We begin, as usual, with the statutory text. In
ordinary usage, “to procure” something is “to get possession of”
it. Webster’s Third New International Dictionary 1809 (2002);
accord, Black’s Law Dictionary 1401 (10th ed. 2014) (defining
“procure” as “[t]o obtain (something), esp. by special effort or
means”). So to “procure . . . naturalization” means to
obtain naturalization (or, to use another word, citizenship). The
adverbial phrase “contrary to law,” wedged in between “procure” and
“naturalization,” then specifies
how a person must procure
naturalization so as to run afoul of the statute: in contravention
of the law—or, in a word, illegally. Putting the pieces together,
someone “procure[s], contrary to law, naturalization” when she
obtains citizenship illegally.
What, then, does that whole phrase mean? The
most natural understanding is that the illegal act must have
somehow contributed to the obtaining of citizenship. Consider if
someone said to you: “John obtained that painting illegally.” You
might imagine that he stole it off the walls of a museum. Or that
he paid for it with a forged check. Or that he impersonated the
true buyer when the auction house delivered it. But in all events,
you would imagine illegal acts in some kind of means-end
relation—or otherwise said, in some kind of causal relation—to the
painting’s acquisition. If someone said to you, “John obtained that
painting illegally, but his unlawful acts did not play any role in
his obtaining it,” you would not have a clue what the statement
meant. You would think it nonsense—or perhaps the opening of a
riddle. That is because if no illegal act contributed at all to
getting the painting, then the painting would not have been gotten
illegally. And the same goes for naturalization. If whatever
illegal conduct occurring within the naturalization process was a
causal dead-end—if, so to speak, the ripples from that act could
not have reached the decision to award citizenship—then the act
cannot support a charge that the applicant obtained naturalization
illegally. The conduct, though itself illegal, would not also make
the obtaining of citizenship so. To get citizenship unlawfully, we
understand, is to get it through an unlawful means—and that is just
to say that an illegality played some role in its
acquisition.[
2]
The Government’s contrary view—that §1425(a)
requires only a “violation[ ] of law in the course of
procuring naturalization”—falters on the way language naturally
works. Brief for United States 14. Return for a moment to our
artwork example. Imagine this time that John made an illegal turn
while driving to the auction house to purchase a painting. Would
you say that he had “procured the painting illegally” because he
happened to violate the law in the course of obtaining it? Not
likely. And again, the same is true with respect to naturalization.
Suppose that an applicant for citizenship fills out the necessary
paperwork in a government office with a knife tucked away in her
handbag (but never mentioned or used). She has violated the
law—specifically, a statute criminalizing the possession of a
weapon in a federal building. See 18 U. S. C. §930. And
she has surely done so “in the course of” procuring citizenship.
But would you say, using English as you ordinarily would, that she
has “procure[d]” her citizenship “contrary to law” (or, as you
would really speak, “illegally”)? Once again, no. That is because
the violation of law and the acquisition of citizenship are in that
example merely coincidental: The one has no causal relation to the
other.
The Government responds to such examples by
seeking to define them out of the statute, but that effort falls
short for multiple reasons. According to the Government, the laws
to which §1425(a) speaks are only laws “pertaining to
naturalization.” Brief for United States 20. But to begin with,
that claim fails on its own terms. The Government’s proposed
limitation has no basis in §1425(a)’s text (which refers to “law”
generally); it is a
deus ex machina—rationalized only by
calling it “necessary,” Tr. of Oral Arg. 39, and serving only to
get the Government out of a tight interpretive spot. Indeed, the
Government does not really buy its own argument: At another point,
it asserts that an applicant for citizenship can violate §1425(a)
by bribing a government official, see Brief for United States
16—even though the law against that conduct has nothing in
particular to do with naturalization. See 18 U. S. C.
§201(b)(1). And still more important, the Government’s (sometime)
carve-out does nothing to alter the linguistic understanding that
gives force to the examples the Government would exclude—and that
applies just as well to every application that would remain. Laws
pertaining to naturalization, in other words, are subject to the
same rules of language usage as laws concerning other subjects. And
under those rules, as we have shown, §1425(a) demands a means-end
connection between a legal violation and naturalization. See
supra, at 5–6. Take §1015(a)’s bar on making false
statements in connection with naturalization—the prototypical
§1425(a) predicate, and the one at issue here. If such a statement
(in an interview, say) has no bearing at all on the decision to
award citizenship, then it cannot render that award—as §1425(a)
requires—illegally gained.
The broader statutory context reinforces that
point, because the Government’s reading would create a profound
mismatch between the requirements for naturalization on the one
hand and those for denaturalization on the other. See
West
Virginia Univ. Hospitals, Inc. v.
Casey, 499 U. S.
83, 101 (1991) (“[I]t is our role to make sense rather than
nonsense out of the
corpus juris”). The immigration statute
requires all applicants for citizenship to have “good moral
character,” and largely defines that term through a list of
unlawful or unethical behaviors. 8 U. S. C. §§1427(a)(3),
1101(f ).[
3] On the
Government’s theory, some legal violations that do not justify
denying citizenship under that definition would nonetheless
justify
revoking it later. Again, false statements under
§1015(a) offer an apt illustration. The statute’s description of
“good moral character” singles out a specific class of lies—“false
testimony for the purpose of obtaining [immigration] benefits”—as a
reason to deny naturalization. 8 U. S. C.
§1101(f )(6). By contrast, “[w]illful misrepresentations made
for other reasons, such as embarrassment, fear, or a desire for
privacy, were not deemed sufficiently culpable to brand the
applicant as someone who lacks good moral character”—and so are not
generally disqualifying.
Kungys v.
United States, 485
U. S. 759, 780 (1988) (quoting Supplemental Brief for United
States 12). But under the Government’s reading of §1425(a), a lie
told in the naturalization process—even out of embarrassment, fear,
or a desire for privacy—would always provide a basis for rescinding
citizenship. The Government could thus take away on one day what it
was required to give the day before.
And by so wholly unmooring the revocation of
citizenship from its award, the Government opens the door to a
world of disquieting consequences—which we would need far stronger
textual support to believe Congress intended. Consider the kinds of
questions a person seeking citizenship confronts on the standard
application form. Says one: “Have you
EVER been
. . . in any way associated with[ ] any
organization, association, fund, foundation, party, club, society,
or similar group[?]” Form N–400, Application for Naturalization 12
(2016), online at http://www.uscis.gov/n-400 (as last visited June
20, 2017) (bold in original). Asks another: “Have you
EVER
committed . . . a crime or offense for which you were
NOT arrested?”
Id., at 14. Suppose, for reasons of
embarrassment or what-have-you, a person concealed her membership
in an online support group or failed to disclose a prior speeding
violation. Under the Government’s view, a prosecutor could scour
her paperwork and bring a §1425(a) charge on that meager basis,
even many years after she became a citizen. That would give
prosecutors nearly limitless leverage—and afford newly naturalized
Americans precious little security. Small wonder that Congress, in
enacting §1425(a), did not go so far as the Government claims. The
statute it passed, most naturally read, strips a person of
citizenship not when she committed any illegal act during the
naturalization process, but only when that act played some role in
her naturalization.
B
That conclusion leaves us with a more
operational question: How should §1425(a)’s requirement of causal
influence apply in practice, when charges are brought under that
law?[
4] Because the proper
analysis may vary with the nature of the predicate crime, we
confine our discussion of that issue to the kind of underlying
illegality alleged here: a false statement made to government
officials. Such conduct can affect a naturalization decision in a
single, significant way—by distorting the Government’s
understanding of the facts when it investigates, and then
adjudicates, an application. So the issue a jury must decide in a
case like this one is whether a false statement sufficiently
altered those processes as to have influenced an award of
citizenship.
The answer to that question, like the
naturalization decision itself, turns on objective legal criteria.
Congress has prescribed specific eligibility standards for new
citizens, respecting such matters as length of residency and
“physical[ ] presen[ce],” understanding of English and
American government, and (as previously mentioned) “good moral
character,” with all its many specific components. See 8
U. S. C. §§1423(a), 1427(a);
supra, at 8.
Government officials are obligated to apply that body of law
faithfully—granting naturalization when the appli-cable criteria
are satisfied, and denying it when they are not. See
Kungys,
485 U. S., at 774, n. 9 (opinion of Scalia, J.);
id., at 787 (Stevens, J., concurring in judgment). And to
ensure right results are reached, a court can reverse such a
determination, at an applicant’s request, based on its “own
findings of fact and conclusions of law.” 8 U. S. C.
§1421(c). The entire system, in other words, is set up to provide
little or no room for subjective preferences or personal whims.
Because that is so, the question of what any individual
decisionmaker might have done with accurate information is beside
the point: The defendant in a §1425(a) case should neither benefit
nor suffer from a wayward official’s deviations from legal
requirements. Accordingly, the proper causal inquiry under §1425(a)
is framed in objective terms: To decide whether a defendant
acquired citizenship by means of a lie, a jury must evaluate how
knowledge of the real facts would have affected a reasonable
government official properly applying naturalization law.
If the facts the defendant misrepresented are
themselves disqualifying, the jury can make quick work of that
inquiry. In such a case, there is an obvious causal link between
the defendant’s lie and her procurement of citizenship. To take an
example: An applicant for citizenship must be physically present in
the United States for more than half of the five-year period
preceding her application. See 8 U. S. C. §1427(a)(1).
Suppose a defendant misrepresented her travel history to convey she
had met that requirement, when in fact she had not. The Government
need only expose that lie to establish that she obtained
naturalization illegally—for had she told the truth instead, the
official would have promptly denied her application. Or consider
another, perhaps more common case stemming from the “good moral
character” criterion. See §1427(a)(3);
supra, at 8. That
phrase is defined to exclude any person who has been convicted of
an aggravated fel-ony. See §1101(f )(8). If a defendant
falsely denied such a conviction, she too would have gotten her
citizenship by means of a lie—for otherwise the outcome would have
been different. In short, when the defendant misrepresents facts
that the law deems incompatible with citizenship, her lie must have
played a role in her naturalization.
But that is not the only time a jury can find
that a defendant’s lie had the requisite bearing on a
naturalization decision. For even if the true facts lying behind a
false statement would not “in and of themselves justify denial of
citizenship,” they could have “led to the discovery of other facts
which would” do so.
Chaunt v.
United States, 364
U. S. 350 –353 (1960). We previously addressed that
possibility when considering the civil statute that authorizes the
Government to revoke naturalization. See
Kungys, 485
U. S., at 774–777 (opinion of Scalia, J.) (interpreting 8
U. S. C. §1451(a)).[
5] As we explained in that context, a person whose lies
throw investigators off a trail leading to disqualifying facts gets
her citizenship by means of those lies—no less than if she had
denied the damning facts at the very end of the trail. See
ibid.
When relying on such an investigation-based
theory, the Government must make a two-part showing to meet its
burden. As an initial matter, the Government has to prove that the
misrepresented fact was sufficiently relevant to one or another
naturalization criterion that it would have prompted reasonable
officials, “seeking only evidence concerning citizenship
qualifications,” to undertake further investigation.
Id., at
774, n. 9. If that much is true, the inquiry turns to the
prospect that such an investigation would have borne disqualifying
fruit. As to that second link in the causal chain, the Government
need not show definitively that its investigation would have
unearthed a disqualifying fact (though, of course, it may). Rather,
the Government need only establish that the investigation “would
predictably have disclosed” some legal disqualification.
Id., at 774; see
id., at 783 (Brennan, J.,
concurring). If that is so, the defendant’s misrepresentation
contributed to the citizenship award in the way we think §1425(a)
requires.
That standard reflects two real-world attributes
of cases premised on what an unhindered investigation would have
found. First is the difficulty of proving that a hypothetical
inquiry would have led to some disqualifying discovery, often
several years after the defendant told her lies. As witnesses and
other evidence disappear, the Government’s effort to reconstruct
the course of a “could have been” investigation confronts
ever-mounting obstacles. See
id., at 779 (opinion of Scalia,
J.). Second, and critical to our analysis, is that the
defendant—not the Government—bears the blame for that evidentiary
predicament. After all, the inquiry cannot get this far unless the
defendant made an unlawful false statement and, by so doing,
obstructed the normal course of an investigation. See
id.,
at 783 (Brennan, J., concurring) (emphasizing that “the citizen’s
misrepresentation [in a naturalization proceeding] necessarily
frustrated the Government’s investigative efforts”); see also
Bigelow v.
RKO Radio Pictures, Inc., 327 U. S.
251, 265 (1946) (“The most elementary conceptions of justice and
public policy require that the wrongdoer shall bear the risk of the
uncertainty which his own wrong has created”).
Section 1425(a) is best read to take those
exigencies and equities into account, by enabling the Government
(as just described) to rest on disqualifications that a thwarted
investigation predictably would have uncovered. A yet-stricter
causal requirement, demanding proof positive that a disqualifying
fact would have been found, sets the bar so high that “we cannot
conceive that Congress intended” that result.
Kungys, 485
U. S., at 777 (opinion of Scalia, J.). And nothing in the
statutory text requires that approach. While §1425(a) clearly
imports some kind of causal or means-end relation, see
supra, at 5–9, Congress left that relation’s precise
character unspecified. Cf.
Burrage v.
United States,
571 U. S. ___, ___ (2014) (slip op., at 10) (noting that
courts have not always construed criminal statutes to
“require[ ] strict but-for causality,” and have greater reason
to reject such a reading when the laws do not use language like
“results from” or “because of”). The open-endedness of the
statutory language allows, indeed supports, our adoption of a
demanding but still practicable causal standard.
Even when the Government can make its two-part
showing, however, the defendant may be able to overcome it. Section
1425(a) is not a tool for denaturalizing people who, the available
evidence indicates, were actually qualified for the citizenship
they obtained. When addressing the civil denaturalization statute,
this Court insisted on a similar point: We provided the defendant
with an opportunity to rebut the Government’s case “by showing,
through a preponderance of the evidence, that the statutory
requirement as to which [a lie] had a natural tendency to produce a
favorable decision was in fact met.”
Kungys, 485 U. S.,
at 777 (opinion of Scalia, J.) (emphasis deleted); accord,
id., at 783–784 (Brennan, J., concurring). Or said
otherwise, we gave the defendant a chance to establish that she was
qualified for citizenship, and held that she could not be
denaturalized if she did so—even though she concealed or
misrepresented facts that suggested the opposite. And indeed, all
our denaturalization decisions share this crucial feature: We have
never read a statute to strip citizenship from someone who met the
legal criteria for acquiring it. See,
e.g., Fedorenko v.
United States, 449 U. S. 490 –507 (1981);
Costello v.
United States, 365 U. S. 265 –272
(1961);
Schneiderman v.
United States, 320 U. S.
118 –123 (1943). We will not start now. Whatever the Government
shows with respect to a thwarted investigation, qualification for
citizenship is a complete defense to a prosecution brought under
§1425(a).
III
Measured against all we have said, the jury
instructions in this case were in error. As earlier noted, the
District Court told the jury that it could convict based on any
false statement in the naturalization process (
i.e., any
violation of §1015(a)), no matter how inconsequential to the
ultimate decision. See App. to Pet. for Cert. 86a;
supra, at
3. But as we have shown, the jury needed to find more than an
unlawful false statement. Recall that Maslenjak’s lie in the
naturalization process concerned her prior statements to
immigration officials: She swore that she had been honest when
applying for admission as a refugee, but in fact she had not. See
supra, at 2–3. The jury could have convicted if that earlier
dishonesty (
i.e., the thing she misrepresented when seeking
citizenship) were itself a reason to deny naturalization—say,
because it counted as “false testimony for the purpose of obtaining
[immigration] benefits” and thus demonstrated bad moral character.
See
supra, at 11–12. Or else, the jury could have convicted
if (1) knowledge of that prior dishonesty would have led a
reasonable official to make some further investigation (say, into
the circumstances of her admission), (2) that inquiry would
predictably have yielded a legal basis for rejecting her
citizenship application, and (3) Maslenjak failed to show that
(notwithstanding such an objective likelihood) she was in fact
qualified to become a U. S. citizen. See
supra, at
12–15. This jury, however, was not asked to—and so did not—make any
of those determinations. Accordingly, Maslenjak was not convicted
by a properly instructed jury of “procur[ing], contrary to law,
[her] naturalization.”
The Government asserts that any instructional
error in this case was harmless. “Had officials known the truth,”
the Government asserts, “it would have affected their decision to
grant [Maslenjak] citizenship.” Brief for United States 12.
Unsurprisingly, Maslenjak disagrees. See Tr. of Oral Arg. 6–8;
Reply to Brief in Opposition 9–10. In keeping with our usual
practice, we leave that dispute for resolution on remand. See,
e.g., Skilling v.
United States, 561 U. S. 358,
414 (2010) .
For the reasons stated, we vacate the judgment
of the Court of Appeals and remand the case for further proceedings
consistent with this opinion.
It is so ordered.
