United States v. Briseño
In United States v. Briseño, No. 23-10797 (5th Cir. Feb. 26, 2025) (unpublished), the Fifth Circuit—over a dissent—affirmed the district court’s decision to deny Briseño’s motion to suppress statements and physical evidence. Briseño had argued that suppression was required due to deficient Miranda warnings and an unlawful search, but the court disagreed.
Background: The FBI received a call from a man, “W.Y.,” who reported that his wife and daughter were being held captive in Dallas by cartel members. He admitted that he had paid to have them smuggled into the country, but he said a drug cartel had kidnapped them and was demanding a $34,000 ransom.
An agent "believed the victims were in imminent danger and action needed to be taken immediately,” so she spoke with W.Y. by phone. FBI agents also “submitted an exigent request form to T-Mobile” requesting detailed information, including “continuous ping location every ten minutes,” for the phone number that had been making the ransom calls to W.Y.
Agents in Dallas were able to use those cell-phone pings to track the phone to Missouri, and agents were able to identify and later stop a vehicle believed to contain the phone. Briseño was the driver of that vehicle, and he owned the phone agents had been targeting.
Following Briseño’s arrest, FBI agents interviewed him for five hours. The interview was conducted in Spanish, although none of the agents was fluent. The main questioner “was a ‘level two Spanish speaker,’ which meant that although he was not fluent, he was able to converse in Spanish.” That agent began to advise Briseño of his Miranda rights while holding a card containing the Miranda warnings in Spanish. In part, the agent said:
you can read this if it is, it is better—because, like you know, I cannot speak, uh, Spanish very well. But, at this moment, the thing that is more important for us and for you is to locate these, these two people. Nothing else.
Briseño picked up the card and looked at it for roughly 20 to 30 seconds before saying, “Mm-hmm.” The Miranda card remained on the table in front of Briseño for 2 minutes and 16 seconds.
Then, during the 5-hour interview, Briseño admitted that he was part of a group that transports noncitizens across the border, but he said W.Y. was lying about the kidnapping. Instead, he claimed that W.Y. had refused to pay part of the agreed-upon fee for transporting his wife and child. Briseño gave agents the address for a house where they could find those two individuals.
Issue 1: Should Briseño’s statements have been suppressed because he was not given proper Miranda warnings and had not knowingly waived his rights? Held: “Because there is a reasonable view of the evidence that supports the finding that Briseño’s waiver of his Miranda rights was knowing and voluntary, the district court did not err by denying the motion to suppress custodial statements.”
At the suppression hearing, the “level two Spanish speaking” agent testified that Briseño had appeared to read the Miranda card after receiving an oral advisement about some, but not all, of his Miranda rights. The district court permissibly credited that testimony, and it concluded that “Briseño’s repeated references to text messages throughout the interrogation suggested that he was literate, which goes to his ability to read the card.” Those facts were sufficient to justify the district court’s denial of Briseño’s motion to suppress.
Issue 2: Did the Government violate the Fourth Amendment by obtaining real-time cell-site location information (“CSLI”) to track Briseño’s phone? Held: No. The district court “did not err in concluding that the warrantless collection of Briseño’s real-time CSLI was justified by exigent circumstances.”
The Fifth Circuit has not yet decided “whether obtaining and using real-time cell-site location information to track a suspect constitutes a search within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment,” and it declined to decide that issue in this case. Instead, the court resolved this issue by agreeing with the district court that the agents’ request for CSLI and tracking information was “objectively reasonable due to exigent circumstances.”
Dissent: Judge James E. Graves, Jr., dissented on both issues.
Regarding Miranda, Judge Graves wrote that “Briseño was not orally advised fully of his rights in Spanish or English, and there was no inquiry into or acknowledgment that he either read or understood them orally or in writing.” He emphasized that the agent never fully advised Briseño of his rights, and no one ever asked Briseño if he had read or understood the rights on the card.
As for CSLI, Judge Graves highlighted the timeline: when agents requested CSLI from the phone carrier, all they had was W.Y.’s phone call. The record did not establish that agents had corroborated any of W.Y.’s claims at the time of their exigent CSLI request. “The record indicates that agents simply took W.Y.’s word for it and submitted an exigent CSLI request.” For those reasons, Judge Graves concluded that the CSLI was improperly obtained.