Supreme Court lifts limits on immigration raids in Los Angeles

LOS ANGELES – The US Supreme Court Monday handed the Trump administration a win and lifted restrictions barring federal agents from making immigration arrests resulting from “roving patrols” that a Los Angeles federal judge determined targeted people for deportation based on their race or language.

The court ruled by a 6-3 margin, granting the federal government’s emergency appeal of the judge’s temporary restraining order freezing the raids as they had been carried out.

US District Judge Maame E. Frimpong issued the temporary restraining order July 11 barring immigration stops based solely on race or ethnicity,
language, location or employment. The US 9th Circuit Court of Appeals later agreed.

In his majority opinion, conservative Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, who was nominated to the high court by President Donald Trump in 2018, wrote that “apparent ethnicity alone cannot furnish reasonable suspicion” but it can be relevant when considered along with other factors.

The court’s three liberal justices dissented from the decision.

In the dissenting opinion, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that the Trump administration “has all but declared that all Latinos, US citizens or not, who work low-wage jobs are fair game to be seized at any time, taken away from work, and held until they provide proof of their legal status to the agents’ satisfaction.”

In its appeal, the Justice Department argued that the injunction “threatens to upend immigration officials’ ability to enforce the immigration laws in the Central District of California by hanging the prospect of contempt over every investigative stop of suspected illegal aliens.”

In response, Mohammad Tajsar, senior staff attorney at the ACLU Foundation of Southern California, blasted the government’s attempt to overturn the LA judge’s order.

“When masked, armed immigration agents abducted people off the streets of Southern California simply because they appear to be Latino or low- wage workers, the entire nation saw how the federal government’s reckless and cruel raids frayed the fabric of one of America’s most vibrant and diverse regions,” Tajsar said in a statement. “The federal government has now gone running to the Supreme Court asking it to undo a narrow court order — applicable in only one judicial district — that merely compels them to follow the Constitution. We look forward to making our case to the Supreme Court that the federal government cannot deprive individuals of their liberty without justification, regardless of their immigration status.”

The roving raids targeting car washes, parking lots where day laborers gather and garment factories disrupted immigrant communities throughout the region for weeks in June and July.

The decision Monday stems from a lawsuit filed in early July in which Southern California residents, workers and advocacy groups accused the US Department of Homeland Security of “abducting and disappearing” community members using unlawful stop and warrantless arrest tactics and confining individuals at a federal building in illegal conditions while denying them access to attorneys.

Lead plaintiff Pedro Vasquez Perdomo, 54, a day laborer of Pasadena, says he was waiting to be picked up for a construction job at a Metro bus stop in front of a Winchell’s Donuts in Pasadena on the morning of June 18 when he and two others were surrounded by masked men with guns,

arrested and taken to a detention center in Los Angeles, where he remained for three weeks. He has since been granted bond and released.

The men who took Vasquez Perdomo never identified themselves to the plaintiffs, never stated they were immigration officers authorized to make arrests, never stated that they had arrest warrants and never informed the plaintiffs of the basis for their arrests, the lawsuit alleges.

“I am afraid that just standing outside can mean being taken again,” Vasquez Perdomo said recently. “I was targeted because I’m Latino, because I’m a day laborer, because I’m invisible.”

Vasquez Perdomo said he became a plaintiff in the case because “I don’t want silence to be my story. I want justice, for me and for every other person whose humanity has been denied.”

Six of the nine justices on the Supreme Court were appointed by Republican presidents. (CNS)

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