United States Court of Appeals For the Eighth Circuit ___________________________ No. 19-1184 ___________________________ United States of America Plaintiff - Appellee v. Mubarak Ahmed Hamed Defendant - Appellant ____________ Appeal from United States District Court for the Western District of Missouri - Jefferson City ____________ Submitted: February 13, 2020 Filed: October 5, 2020 ____________ Before SMITH, Chief Judge, COLLOTON and STRAS, Circuit Judges. ____________ STRAS, Circuit Judge. This case requires us to determine what effect, if any, a guilty plea has on later denaturalization proceedings. In this case, the district court 1 ruled that Hamed was collaterally estopped from taking a position that was inconsistent with what he said 1 The Honorable Brian C. Wimes, United States District Judge for the Western District of Missouri. when he pleaded guilty. Although we conclude that a different species of estoppel applies, we affirm. I. Hamed, a native of Sudan, originally arrived in the United States in 1990 under a student visa. He eventually became the chief executive officer of the Islamic American Relief Agency, which purportedly had humanitarian goals, including aiding the poor, feeding the hungry, and sheltering the orphaned. The organization’s actual activities, however, were not quite so noble. It would send funds to Khalid Al-Sudanee, an individual with ties to terrorism, who would then transport the money into Iraq in violation of economic sanctions in place at the time. While this illegal activity was ongoing, Hamed applied for naturalization. In one form, he marked “no” in response to the question, “[h]ave you ever[] . . . knowingly committed any crime for which you have not been arrested?” When later asked the same question during an in-person interview, he did not change his answer. Although Hamed’s naturalization application was approved in 2000, the truth soon came to light. By 2001, the Department of the Treasury uncovered the illegal transfers into Iraq. And then, in 2004, it announced that both Al-Sudanee and Hamed’s agency were “Specifically Designated Global Terrorist[s].” Six years later, Hamed finally pleaded guilty to violating and conspiring to violate the Iraq Sanctions from “March 1991, . . . until in or around May 2005,” see 18 U.S.C. § 371; 50 U.S.C. §§ 1701–1706, and to misusing the organization’s “tax-exempt status” and omitting “relevant, material information” from tax forms “as early as . . . 1997,” see 26 U.S.C. § 7212(a). Hamed’s troubles were not over. In 2018, eight years after pleading guilty and eighteen years after first becoming a citizen, the government commenced proceedings to denaturalize him. The district court agreed with the government, in -2- response to a motion for judgment on the pleadings, that Hamed’s failure to disclose his criminal activities called for denaturalization because it amounted to “concealment of a material fact or . . . willful misrepresentation.” 8 U.S.C. § 1451(a). II. We review the district court’s decision de novo. Clemons v. Crawford, 585 F.3d 1119, 1124 (8th Cir. 2009). Judgment on the pleadings was appropriate if, “view[ing] all facts pleaded by the nonmoving party as ...
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