CA5: 1836 US-Morocco Treaty of Peace and Friendship as applied to courthouse metal detector not “clearly established law”

Plaintiffs are Moorish-Americans who, on the way to file papers with the clerk, refused to go through the metal detector at the Caddo Parish Courthouse. Entrance was denied. They refused to leave and were then arrested for trespass. They sued everybody involved. The officers get qualified immunity for allegedly not applying the 1836 United States-Morocco Treaty of Peace and Friendship that supposedly immunized plaintiffs’ conduct. (No case has, so how could it be clearly established law?) Bey v. Prator, 2022 U.S. App. LEXIS 31867 (5th Cir. Nov. 17, 2022):

Nor can plaintiffs point to any other clearly established law that rendered the officers’ actions objectively unreasonable. They cannot point to Fourth Amendment jurisprudence that clearly establishes that the officers were required to allow plaintiffs into the courthouse without passing through routine security screening. Indeed, the relevant authorities suggest the opposite and certainly do not clearly establish that the screening was unconstitutional. Plaintiffs also cannot point to the 1836 United States-Morocco Treaty of Peace and Friendship as clearly establishing a right for Moorish Americans to enter the courthouse as a port of commerce without any screening. It is not clearly established that the officers were required to allow plaintiffs to pass through security screening; nor is it clearly established that the officers were not allowed to ask them to leave once they refused and then arrest them once they would not leave after being told to do so.