A federal judge ruled Friday that Homeland Security’s massive operation to arrest and detain migrants in Los Angeles used illegal “roving patrols” based on racial profiling, then wrongly denied those arrested access to lawyers.
Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong, a Biden appointee to the court in California, said some of the arrests appeared to be more like “a kidnapping,” with officers rolling up in unmarked cop cars with tinted windows, jumping out with masks on and guns visible, and shackling and carting off their targets.
Her ruling strikes at the heart of the mass arrests Homeland Security launched last month, which sparked days of riots and prodded President Trump to federalize and deploy the National Guard.
Judge Frimpong banned the department’s agents and officers from making any immigration arrests in central California unless they first have a reasonable suspicion someone is in the country illegally.
The government says that’s what it already does, but Judge Frimpong said the administration’s evidence was too weak.
Her own evidence was news reports of people who “feel that the stops and arrests are overwhelmingly focused on Latinos.”
She brushed aside the government’s insistence that if the judge issued her order, it would need to retrain agents to comply. She said the issue isn’t the training “but rather compliance with the existing law.”
Judge Frimpong pointed to one case where officers made arrests at a car wash. She said the agents’ experience that “undocumented individuals” use and seek work at car washes “falls woefully short of the reasonable suspicion needed to target any particular individual at any particular car wash.”
She said in her 52-page ruling that same standard holds true for other locations and occupations.
“As required by the Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution, defendants shall be enjoined from conducting detentive stops in this district unless the agent or officer has reasonable suspicion that the person to be stopped is within the United States in violation of U.S. immigration law,” she wrote.
She was particularly struck by the officers’ use of masks in their operations, saying that made it impossible to identify the individuals responsible for any of the questionable arrests she pointed to.
Judge Frimpong denied a Justice Department request to stay her ruling.
