Jose Oliva v. Mario Nivar, et al.

Federal police working as security at a Veterans Affairs hospital unreasonably seized seventy-yearold veteran José Oliva, choking and slamming him to the ground without justification. Despite this Court’s admonition in Ziglar v. Abbasi that a constitutional remedy is available for search-and-seizure claims “in this common and recurrent sphere of law enforcement,” 137 S. Ct. 1843, 1856–1857 (2017), the Fifth Circuit held that Oliva could not sue the officers for the violation of his constitutional rights because Oliva’s case is not factually identical to Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents of Federal Bureau of Narcotics, 403 U.S. 388 (1971). Pet. App. 6a–7a. The question presented is: Whether claims against federal police for Fourth Amendment violations committed during standard law enforcement operations fall within an established context for Bivens, as the First, Second, Third, Fourth, Sixth, Ninth, and Eleventh Circuits have held, or whether, as the Fifth Circuit holds below, such claims present a new context unless they involve narcotics officers “manacling the plaintiff in front of his family in his home and stripsearching him in violation of the Fourth Amendment.” Pet. App. 5a.