Federal judge halts indiscriminate immigration stops in Los Angeles and beyond

In a searing ruling against the Trump administration, a federal judge on Friday temporarily blocked federal agents from using racial profiling to carry out indiscriminate immigration arrests that advocates say have terrorized Angelenos, forced people into hiding and damaged the local economy. 

The ruling by U.S. District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong, a Biden appointee, was widely hailed by immigrant rights groups and California Democrats, who have been in a pitched battle with the administration over recent sweeps through Southern California immigrant neighborhoods. 

If adhered to, the ruling would stop immigration agents from roving around Home Depots and car washes, stopping brown-skinned, Spanish-speaking day laborers and others to arrest on immigration charges, as they have been for the past month.

“Justice prevailed today,” Gov. Gavin Newsom posted about the ruling on X Friday evening. 

“The court’s decision puts a temporary stop to federal immigration officials violating people’s rights and racial profiling,” he wrote. “California stands with the law and the Constitution — and I call on the Trump Administration to do the same.”

The orders cover Los Angeles, Riverside, San Bernardino, Orange, Ventura, Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties.

The White House said Friday evening it would challenge the ruling. 

“No federal judge has the authority to dictate immigration policy — that authority rests with Congress and the President,” said Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman. “Enforcement operations require careful planning and execution; skills far beyond the purview or jurisdiction of any judge. We expect this gross overstep of judicial authority to be corrected on appeal.”

In her ruling, Frimpong said she found a sufficient amount of evidence that agents were using race, language, a person’s vocation or the location they are at, such a carwash, Home Depot, swap meet or row of street vendors, to form “reasonable suspicion” — the legal standard needed to detain someone. Frimpong said the reliance on those factors, either alone or in combination does not meet the requirements of the Fourth Amendment.

“What the federal government would have this Court believe in the face of a mountain of evidence presented in this case is that none of this is actually happening,” she said. 

Frimpong ordered federal agents not to use those factors to establish reasonable suspicion to detain people. And that all those in custody at a downtown detention facility known as B-18 must be given 24-hour access to lawyers and a confidential phone line.

U.S. Atty. Bill Essayli, who has brought charges against protesters at the raids, blasted the ruling on X. 

“We strongly disagree with the allegations in the lawsuit and maintain that our agents have never detained individuals without proper legal justification,” he wrote. “Our federal agents will continue to enforce the law and abide by the U.S. Constitution.”

The ruling came at a particularly fraught moment as details of the largest work-site enforcement raid since the crackdown began to emerge.

Agents arrested around 200 suspected undocumented immigrants at two cannabis operations on Thursday, and prompted a tense standoff between authorities and hundreds of protesters in Ventura County. A man who fell 30 feet from a greenhouse roof during the raid was gravely injured and the FBI is investigating whether shots were fired at federal agents during the protest.

Although the order is temporary, the coalition will seek a preliminary injunction that would make it more permanent. The judge has not yet ruled on a request by Los Angeles city, county and seven other municipalities to join the lawsuit. 

“Los Angeles has been under assault by the Trump Administration as masked men grab people off the street, chase working people through parking lots and march through children’s summer camps,” Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass said in a statement Friday evening. “We went to court against the administration because we will never accept these outrageous and un-American acts as normal.”

ACLU, Public Counsel, other groups and private attorneys filed the lawsuit on behalf of several immigrant rights groups, three immigrants picked up at a bus stop and two U.S. citizens, one whom was held despite showing agents his identification .

“I think it’s the most important decision in the history of the country about limitations on what immigration authorities can do when they carry out operations,” said Mark Rosenbaum, a lawyer with Public Counsel. “It means that they can’t racially profile, they can’t treat car wash workers and nannies as illegally in the country just because of who they are. It means that those whom they sweep into detention have to have access to attorneys right away. And it means that the Constitution is not a dirty word. It’s brought the rule of law back to Los Angeles.”

The plaintiffs argued in their complaint that immigration agents cornered brown-skinned people in Home Depot parking lots, at carwashes and at bus stops across Southern California in a show of force without establishing reasonable suspicion that they had violated immigration laws. They allege agents didn’t identify themselves, as required under federal law, and made unlawful warrantless arrests.

Once someone was in custody, the complaint argues, their constitutional rights were further violated by being held in “deplorable” conditions at B-18 without access to a lawyer, or regular food and water.

Frimpong firmly agreed with the plaintiffs, saying they were likely to succeed in trial.

Since June 6, immigration agents have arrested nearly 2,800 undocumented individuals, according to data released by DHS on Tuesday. A Times analysis of arrest data from June 1 to 10 found that 69% of those arrested during that period had no criminal conviction and 58% had never been charged with a crime.

The sweeps have paralyzed parts of the city where high numbers of immigrants work. 

Earlier in the day, before the order was issued, Tom Homan, Trump’s chief advisor on border policy, responded to the tentative ruling, telling Fox News “If the judge makes a decision against what the officers are trained, against what the law is based upon,” he said that it would “shut down operations.”

He echoed government attorneys who argued that agents, in deciding whether to stop a person, can consider location, vocation, clothing, whether they run, and other factors.

“ICE officers and Border Patrol don’t need probable cause to walk up to somebody, briefly detain them, and question them,” he said. “They just need the totality of the circumstances.” 

He said agents receive training on the 4th Amendment every six months. 

Justice Department attorney Sean Skedzielewski, in an hours-long hearing Thursday afternoon, said he would seek a $30-million bond, should the order be granted in order to train agents to comply with it. Frimpong wrote in her decision she would reject the government’s request, since the restraining order doesn’t require training, only “compliance with existing law.”

During the hearing, Frimpong took issue with Skedzielewski’s lack of specific evidence to refute accusations of indiscriminate targeting.

When he argued that “these are sophisticated operations” and seemed to say that arrests stemmed from particular people who were being targeted, she questioned how that could be true.

In other cases where local and federal law enforcement are targeting people for crimes, the judge pointed out, there are reports after an arrest “as to why they arrested this person, how they happened to be where they were and what they did.”

“There doesn’t seem to be anything like that here, which makes it difficult for the court to accept your description of what is happening, because there is no proof that that is what is happening as opposed to what the plaintiffs are saying is happening,” Frimpong said.

Skedzielewski argued the lack of evidence is why the court should not grant a temporary restraining order. The government, he argued, had only “a couple days” to try to identify individuals mentioned in the court filings.

“We just haven’t had a chance to identify in many cases who the people stopped even were, let alone — over a holiday weekend — get ahold of the agents,” he said.

Frimpong didn’t seem moved and questioned the government’s reliance on two high-ranking officials who have played a key role in the raids in Southern California: Kyle Harvick, a Border Patrol agent in charge of El Centro, and Andre Quinones, deputy field office director for Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Their declarations, she said, were “very general” and “did not really engage with the pretty high volume of evidence that the plaintiffs have put in the record of the things we have all seen and heard on the news.”

“If there’s any one of these people and there was a report about ‘this is how we identified this tow yard, parking lot and so on,’ that would have been helpful,” Frimpong said. “It’s hard for the court to believe that in the time that you had, you couldn’t have done that.”

Skedzielewski said the evidence is replete with instances of stops, but “it is not replete with any evidence that those stops or that the agents in any way failed to follow the law.”

He said agents’ actions were “above board.”

Mohammad Tajsar, an attorney with the ACLU of Southern California, told the judge that agents cannot solely use a person’s workplace, their location or the particular work they’re doing as reasons to stop people.

Tajsar added that it was because of the government’s “misunderstanding of the law” that they’d made so many stops of U.S. citizens, including Brian Gavidia, a named plaintiff who was detained by Border Patrol agents outside of a tow yard in Montebello.

Tajsar said Gavidia, who was present in the courtroom during the hearing, was stopped “for no other reason than the fact that he’s Latino and was working at a tow yard” in a predominantly Latino area.

“Because of this fundamental misunderstanding of the law from the government, we have seen so many unconstitutional and unlawful arrests,” Tajsar said.

Tajsar also pushed back on the government attorneys saying they didn’t have enough time, stating that “they had time and they have all the evidence.”

In the court filing of the county and cities trying to join the suit, including Pasadena, Montebello, Monterey Park, Santa Monica, Culver City, Pico Rivera and West Hollywood, they countered that the raids haven’t actually been about immigration enforcement, but are instead politically driven “to make an example” of the region for “implementing policies that President Donald J. Trump dislikes.”

They cited Trump’s post on his social media platform where he calls on immigration officials to do “all in their power” to achieve “the single largest Mass Deportation Program in History” by expanding efforts to detain and deport people in Los Angeles and other cities that are “the core of Democrat power.”

Late Friday evening, Trump’s Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, a Santa Monica native widely viewed as the architect of the sweeping immigration crackdown, responded to the order on X.

“A communist judge in LA has ordered ICE to report directly to her and radical left NGOs — not the president,” he wrote. “This is another act of insurrection against the United States and its sovereign people.”