United States Court of Appeals For the First Circuit No. 19-1953 UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, Appellee, v. JOHN DOE, Defendant, Appellant. APPEAL FROM THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE DISTRICT OF MASSACHUSETTS [Hon. Douglas P. Woodlock, U.S. District Judge] Before Lynch, Thompson, and Barron, Circuit Judges. Derege B. Demissie, with whom Demissie & Church and Antonio Espinoza were on brief, for appellant. Christine J. Wichers, Assistant United States Attorney, with whom Nathaniel R. Mendell, Acting United States Attorney, was on brief, for appellee. January 20, 2022 BARRON, Circuit Judge. In September 2019, the appellant in this case was convicted in the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts on six counts that covered a range of federal crimes. Each of the counts stemmed from his use of the social security number assigned to a José Manuel Rodriguez when the appellant allegedly was not in fact that person. The appellant now challenges each of the resulting convictions in this appeal. Notably, although the appellant continues to maintain that his legal name is José Manuel Rodriguez and that he has gone by no other name, he is referred to in the charges in the indictment that underlie the convictions at issue in this appeal as "John Doe." Thus, given the fact of those convictions, we similarly refer to the appellant as "John Doe" in considering his challenges to them on the two grounds that he argues to us: that the District Court improperly admitted into evidence a form that he submitted to the Social Security Administration (SSA) in 2014, and that the District Court wrongly permitted a former immigration officer to testify at Doe's federal criminal trial to the answers that Doe gave in response to questioning at Miami International Airport. Because we see no merit in either ground for overturning any of the convictions, we affirm each of them. I. In July 2018, a grand jury in the District of Massachusetts indicted Doe on six counts: one count of using a - 2 - fraudulently obtained passport in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1542 (Count One), two counts of misuse of a social security number in violation of 42 U.S.C. § 408(a)(7)(B) (Counts Two and Three), one count of theft of public funds in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 641 (Count Four), and two counts of aggravated identity theft in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1028A (Counts Five and Six). The following facts that pertain to these charges -- each of which concerns Doe's alleged use of social security number (SSN) xxx- xx-9645 -- are not in dispute on appeal. In 1994, Doe visited an SSA office in Boston, Massachusetts in response to a letter that he had received from the U.S. Internal Revenue Service. That letter had informed him that the name associated with the social security number that he had been using until that date, SSN xxx-xx-3455, did not match the name that he went by at the time, which was José Manuel Rodriguez. Rather, SSA …
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