Trump Asks Supreme Court to Lift Restrictions on L.A. Immigration Stops
Judge Maame E. Frimpong of the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, appointed by President Joseph R. Biden Jr., ordered agents not to rely on several factors, alone or in combination, in deciding whom to stop and question in her judicial district.
The factors were race or ethnicity; speaking Spanish or accented English; presence at a particular location, such as a day-laborer or agricultural site; or performing a particular type of work.
A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit refused to pause Judge Frimpong's order.
The order has placed significant restrictions on what had become the center of President Trump's efforts to ramp up immigrant arrests to achieve his pledge of mass deportations. Aggressive enforcement operations in Los Angeles — including encounters captured on video that appeared to be roundups of random Hispanic people by armed agents — set off days of protests and clashes in the area.
In the administration's emergency application to the Supreme Court, D. John Sauer, the solicitor general, wrote that Judge Frimpong's order had unlawfully hamstrung immigration enforcement in the nation's most populous judicial district, one he said 'harbors some two million illegal aliens out of its total population of nearly 20 million people, making it by far the largest destination for illegal aliens.'
Mr. Sauer added that federal agents used judgment and discretion.
'Needless to say,' Mr. Sauer wrote, 'no one thinks that speaking Spanish or working in construction always creates reasonable suspicion. Nor does anyone suggest those are the only factors federal agents ever consider. But in many situations, such factors — alone or in combination — can heighten the likelihood that someone is unlawfully present in the United States, above and beyond the 1-in-10 baseline odds in the district.'
Civil rights groups led by the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California and Public Counsel filed suit on July 2 accusing the Trump administration of unconstitutional sweeps since early June in which thousands of people have been arrested.
The lawsuit accused the administration of unleashing 'indiscriminate immigration operations' that have swept up thousands of day laborers, carwash workers, farmworkers, caregivers and others.
'Individuals with brown skin are approached or pulled aside by unidentified federal agents, suddenly and with a show of force,' the complaint said, 'and made to answer questions about who they are and where they are from,' violating the Fourth Amendment's prohibition of unreasonable searches and seizures.
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