A federal appeals court ruled Friday night to uphold a lower court’s temporary order blocking the Trump administration from conducting indiscriminate immigration stops and arrests in Southern California.
A three-judge panel of the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals held a hearing Monday afternoon at which the federal government asked the court to overturn a temporary restraining order issued July 12 by Judge Maame E. Frimpong, arguing it hindered their enforcement of immigration law.
Immigrant advocacy groups filed suit last month accusing President Donald Trump’s administration of systematically targeting brown-skinned people in Southern California during the administration's crackdown on illegal immigration. The lawsuit included three detained immigrants and two U.S. citizens as plaintiffs.
In her order, Frimpong said there was a “mountain of evidence” that federal immigration enforcement tactics were violating the Constitution. She wrote the government cannot use factors such as apparent race or ethnicity, speaking Spanish or English with an accent, presence at a location such as a tow yard or car wash, or someone’s occupation as the only basis for reasonable suspicion to detain someone.
The appeals court panel agreed and questioned the government's need to oppose an order preventing them from violating the Constitution.
“If, as Defendants suggest, they are not conducting stops that lack reasonable suspicion, they can hardly claim to be irreparably harmed by an injunction aimed at preventing a subset of stops not supported by reasonable suspicion,” the judges wrote.
A hearing for a preliminary injunction, which would be a more substantial court order as the lawsuit proceeds, is scheduled for September.
The Los Angeles region has been a battleground with the Trump administration over its aggressive immigration strategy that spurred protests and the deployment of the National Guard and Marines for several weeks. Federal agents have rounded up immigrants without legal status to be in the U.S. from Home Depots, car washes, bus stops, and farms, many of whom have lived in the country for decades.
Among the plaintiffs is Los Angeles resident Brian Gavidia, who was shown in a video taken by a friend on June 13 being seized by federal agents as he yells, “I was born here in the states, East LA bro!”
They want to “send us back to a world where a U.S. citizen ... can be grabbed, slammed against a fence and have his phone and ID taken from him just because he was working at a tow yard in a Latino neighborhood,” American Civil Liberties Union attorney Mohammad Tajsar told the court Monday.
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The federal government argued that it hadn’t been given enough time to collect and present evidence in the lawsuit, given that it was filed shortly before the July 4 holiday and a hearing was held the following week.
“It’s a very serious thing to say that multiple federal government agencies have a policy of violating the Constitution,” attorney Jacob Roth said.
He also argued that the lower court’s order was too broad, and that immigrant advocates did not present enough evidence to prove that the government had an official policy of stopping people without reasonable suspicion.
He referred to the four factors of race, language, presence at a location, and occupation that were listed in the temporary restraining order, saying the court should not be able to ban the government from using them at all. He also argued that the order was unclear on what exactly is permissible under the law.
“Legally, I think it’s appropriate to use the factors for reasonable suspicion,” Roth said
The judges sharply questioned the government over their arguments.
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“No one has suggested that you cannot consider these factors at all,” Judge Jennifer Sung said.
However, those factors alone only form a “broad profile” and don’t satisfy the reasonable suspicion standard to stop someone, she said.
Sung, a Biden appointee, said that in an area like Los Angeles, where Latinos make up as much as half the population, those factors “cannot possibly weed out those who have undocumented status and those who have documented legal status.”
She also asked: “What is the harm to being told not to do something that you claim you’re already not doing?”
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass called the Friday night decision a “victory for the rule of law” and said the city will protect residents from the “racial profiling and other illegal tactics” used by federal agents.
