RECOMMENDED FOR PUBLICATION Pursuant to Sixth Circuit I.O.P. 32.1(b) File Name: 20a0348p.06 UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE SIXTH CIRCUIT ┐ SUSANA MIREYA MORALES BRIBIESCA, │ Petitioner, │ > No. 18-3948 │ v. │ │ WILLIAM P. BARR, Attorney General, │ Respondent. │ ┘ Petition for Review from the Board of Immigration Appeals; No. A 047 770 293. Decided and Filed: October 30, 2020 Before: GIBBONS, KETHLEDGE, and BUSH, Circuit Judges. _________________ COUNSEL ON BRIEF: Blake P. Somers, BLAKE P. SOMERS LLC, Cincinnati, Ohio, for Petitioner. Jesse D. Lorenz, UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE, Washington, D.C., for Respondent. KETHLEDGE, J., delivered the opinion of the court in which BUSH, J., joined. GIBBONS, J. (pp. 9–15), delivered a separate dissenting opinion. _________________ OPINION _________________ KETHLEDGE, Circuit Judge. In March 2007, at a border crossing near Tijuana, Mexico, Susana Mireya Morales Bribiesca (“Morales”) presented a fraudulent birth certificate to a United States Customs and Border Protection Officer on behalf of her cousin Jorge, who lacked documentation to enter the country legally. After a removal hearing at which numerous No. 18-3948 Morales Bribiesca v. Barr Page 2 witnesses testified, an immigration judge found that Morales—who was then a lawful permanent resident of the United States—had tried to smuggle Jorge into the United States and that she was therefore inadmissible under the Immigration Act. The Board of Immigration Appeals agreed and entered a final order of removal. Morales now argues on various grounds that insufficient evidence supported the immigration judge’s finding that she engaged in alien smuggling. We reject her arguments and deny the petition. I. A. Morales was born in Guadalajara, Mexico. She became a lawful permanent resident of the United States in 2001, and settled in Ohio. In November 2006 she travelled by herself back to Guadalajara and stayed there more than three months, visiting relatives. She left Guadalajara in early March 2007, but did not travel directly back to the United States. Instead she flew to Tijuana because, she said, she planned to visit her aunt in Los Angeles. Morales testified as follows regarding the relevant events after her arrival in Tijuana and before she tried to enter the United States on March 7, 2007. Upon arriving in Tijuana, Morales checked into a hotel. The next day she called her cousin, Guadalupe Madrigal Morales, a U.S. citizen who was living in California (apparently in Los Angeles). Although Morales purportedly had not made any arrangements with Guadalupe “ahead of time to drive back to the United States[,]” she asked Guadalupe to drive down to Tijuana and then to drive her back to Los Angeles. Guadalupe agreed and showed up at the hotel only two hours later with her boyfriend, Mauricio Ruiz, Jr., who was himself a U.S. citizen and a Los Angeles police officer. When Guadalupe arrived, Morales was accompanied by four other relatives: her cousin Alejandro Roscoe Morales; another cousin, Alisa Navarro Morales; and Alisa’s two sons, Brandon and Jorge, whom Morales had met in Guadalajara a few months before. ...
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