Tanvir v. Comey

Background

Muhammad Tanvir, Jameel Algibhah, and Naveed Shinwari alleged that Federal Bureau of Investigation agents placed or kept them on the Terrorist Screening Center’s No Fly List after they refused to become informants against members of Muslim communities. The plaintiffs alleged that acting as informants would conflict with their sincerely held religious beliefs and that the agents used the list to pressure them to reconsider.

The plaintiffs initially sued federal agents in their official capacities and sought removal from the No Fly List. After the plaintiffs were removed from the list, the remaining claims sought money damages under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), 42 U.S.C. § 2000bb et seq., against the agents in their individual capacities. The Supreme Court had previously held in this action that RFRA permits money-damages claims against federal officials sued individually, but it left the qualified-immunity issue for the district court.

Motion and Legal Standards

The defendants filed a renewed motion to dismiss under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 12(b)(6), arguing that the amended complaint failed to state a claim, and under qualified immunity. Qualified immunity generally protects government officials from damages liability unless their conduct violated a constitutional or statutory right that was clearly established at the time.

For purposes of the motion, the court accepted the complaint’s factual allegations as true and drew reasonable inferences for the plaintiffs. Under RFRA, the plaintiffs had to allege that they sought to engage in religious exercise and that the defendants substantially burdened that exercise. The court then considered whether the alleged violation was clearly established when the defendants interacted with the plaintiffs.

Court’s Analysis

The court defined the asserted right as the right not to be pressured by law enforcement to inform on members of one’s religious community through the coercive or retaliatory use of the No Fly List. It rejected the plaintiffs’ broader formulation—a general right to be free from government pressure that forces a person to violate sincerely held religious beliefs—as too general for the qualified-immunity analysis.

The court concluded that no federal court had clearly established, at the relevant times, that law-enforcement pressure to inform on members of one’s religious community, including through the No Fly List, substantially burdened religious exercise in violation of RFRA. The court found that the cases cited by the plaintiffs involved materially different circumstances, and that some cited decisions postdated the alleged conduct. It also concluded that RFRA’s text did not provide sufficiently clear notice in these circumstances. Although the alleged conduct was connected to the government’s intelligence-gathering and national-security efforts, the court said the allegations did not involve conduct undertaken with no governmental justification at all.

The court did not reach the separate personal-jurisdiction issue raised by some defendants because it concluded that all defendants were entitled to qualified immunity. It also did not determine that the alleged conduct definitively complied with RFRA; rather, it held that the right asserted by the plaintiffs was not clearly established when the alleged conduct occurred.

Disposition

Judge Ronnie Abrams held that the defendants were entitled to qualified immunity and granted the renewed motion to dismiss. The court determined that further amendment would be futile because changing the pleadings could not change the state of the law at the relevant time. It therefore dismissed the remaining claims with prejudice and directed the Clerk of Court to terminate the pending motions and close the action.