Defendants run a family-owned Mexican restaurant in West Virginia. HSI did a masked and armed immigration middle of day raid for employees under an inspection warrant. While the raid may have been “shocking” to everybody, it’s not enough to be unreasonable. And there’s a standing issue. United States v. Aguirre-Arello, 2026 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 235841 (S.D. W. Va. Oct. 15, 2026):
It may be that law enforcement unreasonably executed the warrant at the Rio Grande restaurant. Armed, armored, and masked officers and agents descended upon a family restaurant in the middle of the day. They questioned individuals present and seized eight individuals—not the Defendants. Those actions by the Government are sure to have struck fear into the hearts of the patrons, the staff, and the community. This, however, is not sufficient to establish standing for the Defendants.
I came to the same conclusion in a similarly shocking case. See United States v. Westmoreland, 982 F. Supp. 376 (S.D. W. Va. 1997). In Westmoreland “five to seven agents stormed” into Dr. Westmoreland’s (the defendant’s) waiting room where at least 15 patients, some elderly, were waiting. Id. at 379. At a suppression hearing, patients in the room that day testified to the “shock” of the raid, recounting how they were searched and questioned while Westmoreland’s sixteen-year-old daughter cried out in the waiting room. Id. at 379-80. “Over thirty minutes passed before the agents allowed any patients to leave.” Id. at 380.
Westmoreland moved to suppress the fruits of the search on four bases, including the reasonableness of the execution of the search warrant. Id. at 381. I quickly concluded that it was, in fact, unreasonable, and observed that it was “inexplicable why agents thought it necessary to hold between fifteen and twenty innocent citizens at gunpoint, to order them to turn and place their hands against the wall, and to demand that they remain motionless in that position for eight minutes.” Id.
But the analysis did not end there because despite how “outrageous” and “egregious” the search was, Westmoreland lacked standing to challenge it. Id. at 377-78. Instead, I found that his motion to suppress failed “as a matter of substantive Fourth Amendment law.” Id. at 381. The problem:
Because the agents conducted the search pursuant to a warrant, the illegality cannot arise from the fact that a search occurred. Instead, it was the manner in which agents executed the search that violated the Fourth Amendment. Yet the agents did not inflict their outrageous conduct on the defendant, but on his patients, housekeeper, and child. Westmoreland was neither present nor personally aggrieved by the unreasonable execution of the search warrant in the waiting room or in the residence.
Id. at 382.
Here the result is the same. The raid at Rio Grande may have disturbed the customers and the staff, but the Defendants who now challenge the execution of the search warrant were neither searched nor seized. It may be that the search uncovered evidence helpful to the Government and harmful to the Defendants, but the Defendants lack standing to challenge the execution. On that ground, the motion to dismiss and suppress must be DENIED.
"If it was easy, everybody would be doing it. It isn't, and they don't." —Me
"Life is not a matter of holding good cards, but of playing a poor hand well." –Josh Billings (pseudonym of Henry Wheeler Shaw), Josh Billings on Ice, and Other Things (1868) (erroneously attributed to Robert Louis Stevenson, among others)
“I am still learning.” —Domenico Giuntalodi (but misattributed to Michelangelo Buonarroti (common phrase throughout 1500's)).
"Love work; hate mastery over others; and avoid intimacy with the government."
—Shemaya, in the Thalmud
"It is a pleasant world we live in, sir, a very pleasant world. There are bad people in it, Mr. Richard, but if there were no bad people, there would be no good lawyers."
—Charles Dickens, “The Old Curiosity Shop ... With a Frontispiece. From a Painting by Geo. Cattermole, Etc.” 255 (1848)
"A system of law that not only makes certain conduct criminal, but also lays down rules for the conduct of the authorities, often becomes complex in its application to individual cases, and will from time to time produce imperfect results, especially if one's attention is confined to the particular case at bar. Some criminals do go free because of the necessity of keeping government and its servants in their place. That is one of the costs of having and enforcing a Bill of Rights. This country is built on the assumption that the cost is worth paying, and that in the long run we are all both freer and safer if the Constitution is strictly enforced." —Williams v. Nix, 700 F. 2d 1164, 1173 (8th Cir. 1983) (Richard Sheppard Arnold, J.), rev'd Nix v. Williams, 467 US. 431 (1984).
"The criminal goes free, if he must, but it is the law that sets him free. Nothing can destroy a government more quickly than its failure to observe its own laws, or worse, its disregard of the charter of its own existence." —Mapp v. Ohio, 367 U.S. 643, 659 (1961).
"Any costs the exclusionary rule are costs imposed directly by the Fourth Amendment."
—Yale Kamisar, 86 Mich.L.Rev. 1, 36 n. 151 (1987).
"There have been powerful hydraulic pressures throughout our history that bear heavily on the Court to water down constitutional guarantees and give the police the upper hand. That hydraulic pressure has probably never been greater than it is today." — Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1, 39 (1968) (Douglas, J., dissenting).
"The great end, for which men entered into society, was to secure their property." —Entick v. Carrington, 19 How.St.Tr. 1029, 1066, 95 Eng. Rep. 807 (C.P. 1765)
"It is a fair summary of history to say that the safeguards of liberty have frequently been forged in controversies involving not very nice people. And so, while we are concerned here with a shabby defrauder, we must deal with his case in the context of what are really the great themes expressed by the Fourth Amendment." —United States v. Rabinowitz, 339 U.S. 56, 69 (1950) (Frankfurter, J., dissenting)
"The course of true law pertaining to searches and seizures, as enunciated here, has not–to put it mildly–run smooth." —Chapman v. United States, 365 U.S. 610, 618 (1961) (Frankfurter, J., concurring).
"A search is a search, even if it happens to disclose nothing but the bottom of a turntable." —Arizona v. Hicks, 480 U.S. 321, 325 (1987)
"For the Fourth Amendment protects people, not places. What a person knowingly exposes to the public, even in his own home or office, is not a subject of Fourth Amendment protection. ... But what he seeks to preserve as private, even in an area accessible to the public, may be constitutionally protected." —Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 347, 351 (1967)
“Experience should teach us to be most on guard to protect liberty when the Government’s purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.” —United States v. Olmstead, 277 U.S. 438, 479 (1925) (Brandeis, J., dissenting)
“Liberty—the freedom from unwarranted intrusion by government—is as easily lost through insistent nibbles by government officials who seek to do their jobs too well as by those whose purpose it is to oppress; the piranha can be as deadly as the shark.” —United States v. $124,570, 873 F.2d 1240, 1246 (9th Cir. 1989)
"You can't always get what you want / But if you try sometimes / You just might find / You get what you need." —Mick Jagger & Keith Richards, Let it Bleed (album, 1969)
"In Germany, they first came for the communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Catholic. Then they came for me–and by that time there was nobody left to speak up."
—Martin Niemöller (1945) [he served seven years in a concentration camp]
“Children grow up thinking the adult world is ordered, rational, fit for purpose. It’s crap. Becoming a man is realising that it’s all rotten. Realising how to celebrate that rottenness, that’s freedom.” – John le Carré, The Night Manager (1993), line by Richard Roper
"The point of the Fourth Amendment, which often is not grasped by zealous officers, is not that it denies law enforcement the support of the usual inferences which reasonable men draw from evidence. Its protection consists in requiring that those inferences be drawn by a neutral and detached magistrate instead of being judged by the officer engaged in the often competitive enterprise of ferreting out crime." —Johnson v. United States, 333 U.S. 10, 13-14 (1948)
The book was dedicated in the first (1982) and sixth (2025) editions to Justin William Hall (1975-2025). He was three when this project started in 1978.
