In United States v. Rogoza-Garcia, --- F.3d ---, No. 16-50490 (9th Cir. 2018), the Court affirmed the district court’s denial of the defendant’s motion to suppress drugs found in his car during a stop near Fallbrook, Ca.
The justification for the stop was paltry: Baja plates, multiple border crossings, slowing when passing law enforcement, driver both paying attention to the agents and not paying attention to the agents.
But under Valdez-Vega, the Court must "allow[] officers to draw on their own experience and specialized training to make inferences from and deductions about the cumulative information available to them that might well elude an untrained person." So, the Court finds sufficient reasonable suspicion.
There is a concurrence warning that "law enforcement may not support a stop using innocent conduct, in and of itself. Because many of these factors may disproportionately apply to the Latino population, as they did here, there is a risk of sanctioning race- or ethnicity-based stops."
