In the
United States Court of Appeals
For the Seventh Circuit
No. 10-1618
A LICJA K ANIA W ROBLEWSKA,
Petitioner,
v.
E RIC H. H OLDER, JR., Attorney General
of the United States,
Respondent.
Petition for Review from an Order of the
Board of Immigration Appeals.
No. A 077 646 892
S UBMITTED F EBRUARY 7, 2011 —D ECIDED A UGUST 24, 2011
Before
R OVNER and W OOD , Circuit Judges, and
G OTTSCHALL, District Judge.
W OOD , Circuit Judge. Alicja Kania Wroblewska, the
petitioner, is a citizen of Poland who came to the
After an examination of the briefs and the record, we have
concluded that oral argument is unnecessary. Thus the appeal is
submitted on the briefs and the record. F ED . R. A PP . P. 34(a)(2).
The Honorable Joan B. Gottschall, of the Northern District
of Illinois, sitting by designation.
2 No. 10-1618
United States on a visitor’s visa in 1994. She overstayed
her visa and was caught allegedly trying to bribe an
immigration officer in November 1999 in Operation
Durango, a sting operation with which we have become
quite familiar. See Pawlowska v. Holder, 623 F.3d 1138
(7th Cir. 2010); Mozdzen v. Holder, 622 F.3d 680 (7th Cir.
2010); Krasilych v. Holder, 583 F.3d 962 (7th Cir. 2009);
Skorusa v. Gonzales, 482 F.3d 939 (7th Cir. 2007); Pieniazek
v. Gonzales, 449 F.3d 792 (7th Cir. 2006).
Before her removal proceedings began, Wroblewska
married Boguslaw Kania, a U.S. citizen. Kania filed a
petition for an alien relative visa; in it, he named
Wroblewska as the beneficiary. In October 2006, shortly
after the petition was approved, Wroblewska filed an
application to adjust her status under section 245 of the
Immigration and Nationality Act, 8 U.S.C. § 1255. She
then appeared in the Immigration Court for the first
time and admitted that she was removable as a non-
immigrant visitor present in the country beyond the
time allowed by her visa. See 8 U.S.C. § 1227(a)(1)(B). At
the same time, she moved to suppress all of the adverse
evidence that had been collected in 1999 through Opera-
tion Durango, and she asked the Immigration Judge (IJ)
to terminate the removal proceedings because of her
application for an adjustment of status. The IJ found
Wroblewska removable, denied her motion to suppress,
and decided that she was not entitled to adjust her sta-
tus. In the IJ’s opinion, adjustment was not warranted
because the evidence from Operation Durango showed
that Wroblewska had bribed an immigration official,
and that behavior outweighed all of the equities in favor
No. 10-1618 3
of relief. The Board of Immigration Appeals dismissed
Wroblewska’s appeal, and this petition followed.
Wroblewska faces an uphill battle because of limita-
tions to the court’s jurisdiction in this area. Although
we might have been inclined to weigh the equities more
charitably than the IJ did, Congress has not granted us
that authority. Any challenge to the IJ’s denial of
Wroblewska’s application for an adjustment of status
had to be based on legal or constitutional arguments. In
that regard, Wroblewska’s lawyer—Reza Baniassadi—
seriously hampered her chances. In Wroblewska’s peti-
tion, Attorney Baniassadi presented a single, underdevel-
oped legal argument: that evidence gathered during
Operation Durango should have been suppressed
because the operation itself was an egregious violation
of Wroblewska’s right to due process. Worse yet, this
argument was foreclosed by Krasilych v. Holder, supra,
a decision that was issued more than a year before
Wroblewska’s opening brief was filed in this case. Ac-
cordingly, we deny Wroblewska’s petition for review.
We will have more to say about Attorney Baniassadi’s
performance shortly.
I
Given the extensive treatment of Operation Durango
in our previous decisions, we can be brief with the de-
tails. It was a sting designed by three federal agencies
to catch “brokers” who were helping to procure immigra-
tion benefits for aliens illegally. The brokers would take
aliens who hoped to become permanent residents of the
4 No. 10-1618
United States to a storefront on the north side of Chi-
cago. There they would meet with undercover immigra-
tion agents who held themselves out as corrupt officials
ready to help with the adjustment of status. The brokers
sometimes told the aliens that the process was real and
legal. See, e.g., Skorusa, 482 F.3d at 940. Still, the agencies
that ran the operation maintain that they took steps to
make sure that neither aliens nor brokers caught in
their net would later assert that they had been confused
about the legality of the transactions taking place. The
government points out that there were no signs on
display in the store that would have given the impres-
sion that it was a government office, nor did the under-
cover immigration officials who worked the sting wear
INS uniforms.
Apart from decor and dress code, however, the proce-
dure used in Operation Durango looked a lot like the
normal adjustment-of-status process. In most cases,
including the one now before us, Clarence Robinson
was the immigration officer working undercover. Robin-
son would meet the alien; he would help her to fill out
an I-485 application for adjustment of status; and he
would interview her as he would any other person who
might have applied for a change in status through
regular channels. At the conclusion of the meeting, Robin-
son would place a genuine I-551 stamp in the alien’s
passport. This stamp usually signifies that a person’s
application for adjustment of status has been approved
and that she is awaiting a green card. But see Mozdzen,
622 F.3d at 684 (holding that stamps obtained through
Operation Durango do not change an alien’s legal status).
No. 10-1618 5
To increase the appearance of authenticity, meetings
with Robinson were preceded by fingerprinting and
medical checkups—two steps required of all people
who apply for adjustment of status.
When the meetings ended, the alien would pay
Robinson a $5,000 fee, usually through the broker facil-
itating the transaction. Robinson would explain to the
alien that she should tell any official who inquired that
she had been granted adjustment of status because of a
petition filed by a U.S. citizen sibling. In Wroblewska’s
case, Robinson instructed her to tell anyone who
inquired that she had met with him at the INS offices
in downtown Chicago. During Operation Durango,
Robinson met with almost 300 aliens and their brokers.
The local U.S. Attorney’s Office prosecuted the
brokers, and the aliens—most of them from Eastern
Europe—were referred for removal proceedings.
Throughout her removal proceedings, Wroblewska
has maintained that she thought she was adjusting her
status legally in 1999, and she has always denied paying
a $5,000 bribe to Robinson. Her story is believable in
some respects. In the past, we have called Operation
Durango “a shady sting operation that in some
countries . . . might represent the way that business is
actually done,” Pawlowska, 623 F.3d at 1142, and we have
also noted that, throughout the operation, “Robinson
tried to make the process seem[] as official as possi-
ble,” Skorusa, 482 F.3d at 941. Moreover, the evidence
presented during the removal proceedings relating to
the bribe that Wroblewska allegedly paid to Robinson
6 No. 10-1618
was remarkably thin. Wroblewska testified that she
did not pay a bribe; and Robinson testified that
Wroblewska’s broker paid him $5,000 after their meeting
had ended. Robinson admitted, however, that he had
no direct evidence that Wroblewska furnished that
money—he did not see Wroblewska give the broker
$5,000 and the broker made the payment after
Wroblewska left. According to the government, a video
recording of the entire transaction was made, but we
have no idea if that is so, because the government
did not introduce it as evidence and the IJ never asked
to see it.
The IJ noted that Wroblewska satisfied two of the
three statutory factors required for adjustment of status:
she had been lawfully admitted into the United States
when she arrived, and a visa was immediately available
given her husband’s successful petition; the only open
question was whether Wroblewska’s moral character
warranted a favorable exercise of discretion. The IJ identi-
fied “strong equities” that weighed in favor of approving
Wroblewska’s application for an adjustment of status.
Wroblewska had been married happily to a U.S. citizen
for a number of years; she and her husband had
mingled their assets and had lived together without
interruption; she had no criminal record; and she was
gainfully employed. Nonetheless, the IJ ultimately con-
cluded that the balance of equities weighed against her,
solely because he found that her assertion that she
never bribed Robinson was not credible. “I do not find
the respondent’s testimony that she did not know that
she was bribing an officer to be credible,” the IJ said,
No. 10-1618 7
before continuing cryptically, “The circumstances speak
to her intent, which [sic] she actually did on Novem-
ber 1999, speaks to what she intended to do. And that
those circumstances point clearly to an effort of bribery
rather than to an innocent who is simply mislead [sic] by
a broker.” By that the IJ presumably meant that
Wroblewska must have known that $5,000 was too high
a price to pay to adjust her status legally, she should
have been suspicious of Robinson’s instruction to lie
about the location of the interview, and she must have
known that she was not eligible to adjust her status in
1999. The Board agreed with the IJ’s assessment.
The agency’s evaluation of the equities is not partic-
ularly persuasive. Were we in the IJ’s shoes, faced with
the government’s assertion that an alien had bribed a
federal immigration official, we would demand more
than weak circumstantial evidence to support that al-
legation. It is especially troubling that the government
purported to have a video recording of the entire trans-
action, but then it never produced any such thing. With
a swearing match on the stand and an objective record
of the transaction available, it is baffling why the agency
would not have been interested in seeing what actually
had occurred at the meeting between Wroblewska and
Robinson. In light of the government’s weak evidence
of bribery and Wroblewska’s happy marriage and
fruitful participation in the community, we might have
weighed the equities differently than the agency. But
that is not our role. We lack jurisdiction to review a
variety of agency decisions denying discretionary relief,
including an IJ’s decision to deny an application for
8 No. 10-1618
adjustment of status. See 8 U.S.C. § 1252(a)(2)(B)(i) (barring
review of decisions made pursuant to 8 U.S.C. § 1255,
among other provisions); Pawlowska, 623 F.3d at 1141 &
n.4 (explaining that the Court’s decision in Kucana v.
Holder, 130 S. Ct. 827 (2010), does not affect this juris-
dictional bar). The IJ’s view of Wroblewska’s credibility
and his balancing of the equities must therefore stand
undisturbed.
II
Our jurisdiction is not so limited, however, when it
comes to “constitutional claims or questions of law”
that are related to the denial of an application for ad-
justment of status. 8 U.S.C. § 1252(a)(2)(D); Jarad v. Gonza-
les, 461 F.3d 867, 868-69 (7th Cir. 2006). Wroblewska’s
petition presents a single legal argument. She says that
all evidence gathered in Operation Durango should
have been excluded from her removal proceedings
because the operation violated her right to due process.
Without this evidence, she implies, the IJ would have
had no reason to deny her application for an adjustment
of status.
If there is a good due process challenge to Operation
Durango out there, we would not know from the argu-
ments made here. Indeed, the entire argument section
of Wroblewska’s opening brief in this court included only
about 500 words. The substance of her claim—apart from
a conclusory suggestion that the Supreme Court’s decision
in INS v. Lopez-Mendoza, 468 U.S. 1032, 1040-50 (1984)
is distinguishable—is presented in a single paragraph:
No. 10-1618 9
The IJ and the BIA erroneously held that the Petitioner
did not demonstrate that the evidence was obtained
as a result of an egregious violation of due process
rights. In the present case, the Service’s actions
were not limited to a simple arrest. The Service’s
actions, however, amounted to malicious entrapment
of law abiding citizens. To be precise, the Service’s
Operation Durango targeted Polish and Eastern
European community [sic] in Chicago, during which
the Service sought out law abiding citizens and
through its undercover agents, encouraged and
trapped people to submit baseless applications for
adjustment of status.
Petitioner’s Br. at 13-14. Attorney Baniassadi did not
attempt to elaborate on this statement or to respond to
any of the government’s counterarguments, because
he chose not to file a reply brief.
In addition to the fact that counsel’s argument on
behalf of Wroblewska is so cursory, it is also unsatis-
factory because, without explanation, it relies on an
argument that had been squarely foreclosed in another
decision about Operation Durango that we issued one
year before Wroblewska’s opening brief was filed. We
said in Krasilych that a petitioner who “blithely asserts
that ‘Fourth Amendment violations’ in Operation
Durango were ‘widespread and egregious’ ” does not
demonstrate a violation of the Fourth Amendment or of
any other liberty. 583 F.3d at 967. Attorney Baniassadi
attempts to explain away Krasilych in a footnote,
remarking that he filed Wroblewska’s notice of appeal
10 No. 10-1618
in the agency before we issued our decision in Krasilych.
This is a non sequitur, not a ground on which our prior
decision can be distinguished. Attorney Baniassadi
knew of Krasilych when he filed his brief and he should
have confronted it. Instead, he repeated the precise
mistake that we criticized in Krasilych: he blithely asserts
that Operation Durango was “an egregious violation of
due process rights,” but he does not explain why. It
would be different if he had acknowledged our earlier
decision and indicated that he was preserving a point
for further review, but there is no such indication in
the brief. The Supreme Court has required a showing
of “egregious violations of Fourth Amendment or other
liberties that might transgress notions of fundamental
fairness” before the exclusionary rule will apply in immi-
gration proceedings. Lopez-Mendoza, 468 U.S. at 1050-51.
It makes no difference that Wroblewska’s argument is
styled as a due-process argument rather than one based
on the Fourth Amendment. Finally, to the extent that
the brief suggests that Wroblewska was entrapped,
counsel misunderstands entrapment. “Entrapment refers
to the use of inducements that cause a normally law-
abiding person to commit a crime.” United States v.
Morris, 549 F.3d 548, 551 (7th Cir. 2008). At the time
that Wroblewska was caught in the sting she was com-
mitting a continuing violation of the immigration laws
and had no basis for applying for an adjustment of
status. Operation Durango simply brought her to the
attention of immigration officials.
For these reasons we must deny Wroblewska’s peti-
tion for review. We are disturbed, however, by Attor-
No. 10-1618 11
ney Baniassadi’s perfunctory performance. People in
Wroblewska’s position face life-changing consequences
from their immigration proceedings. Cf. Padilla v.
Kentucky, 130 S. Ct. 1473 (2010). Because Attorney
Baniassadi’s effort fell far below the minimum standards
for competent representation in this court, we are re-
questing the Clerk of the Court to forward a copy of
this opinion to the Illinois Attorney Registration & Disci-
plinary Commission.
* * *
The petition for review is D ENIED.
8-24-11