A couple months ago there were riots taking place in Los Angeles after ICE agents moved in an started making arrests. But that issue died down substantially after a judge put in place an injunction on July 11.
U.S. District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong ruled Friday that Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents were conducting “roving patrols” of the city and coordinating arrests without “reasonable suspicion” that their targets were in the country illegally. Rather, she ruled, they are relying on improper factors — race, accent and line of work.
“The factors that defendants appear to rely on for reasonable suspicion seem no more indicative of illegal presence in the country than of legal presence — such as working at low-wage occupations such as car wash attendants and day laborers,” the Biden-appointed judge wrote in a 52-page opinion. “That is insufficient and impermissible.”
Judge Frimpong's TRO was very specific that four factors could not be used by ICE to target someone for arrest:
Frimpong issued a temporary restraining order (TRO) blocking ICE from using the four factors of race, language, location, and job type in deciding whom to detain for questioning, unless agents have additional grounds for suspicion. The TRO covers the counties of Los Angeles, Riverside, San Bernardino, Orange, Ventura, Santa Barbara, and San Luis Obispo—a huge area containing an estimated 1.5 million illegal aliens. Though Frimpong held that the four banned factors may in theory be used in tandem with other factors, her order in essence shuts down ICE’s ability to question suspects in her district...
Immigrant advocates greeted Frimpong’s order ecstatically, immediately grasping its implications for immigration enforcement. Mark Rosenbaum, for decades a lawyer with the ACLU of Southern California and now with Public Counsel, a public interest firm, called it “the most important decision in the history of the country about limitations on what immigration authorities can do when they carry out operations.”
The Trump administration appealed and, in August, lost at the 9th Circuit. From there they made an appeal to the Supreme Court. Today SCOTUS issued a 6-3 decision removing the TRO.
The Supreme Court on Monday backed President Donald Trump’s push to allow immigration enforcement officials to continue what critics describe as “roving patrols” in Southern California that lower courts said likely violated the Fourth Amendment...
Though the court did not provide any analysis explaining its decision, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, a member of the conservative wing who sided with Trump, wrote in a concurrence that the circumstances the agents were considering “taken together can constitute at least reasonable suspicion of illegal presence in the United States.”
“Importantly,” Kavanaugh added, “reasonable suspicion means only that immigration officers may briefly stop the individual and inquire about immigration status.”
From the decision itself, here's a bit more of Kavanaugh's argument:
The Government estimates that at least 15 million people are in the United States illegally. Many millions illegally entered (or illegally overstayed) just in the last few years.
Illegal immigration is especially pronounced in the Los Angeles area, among other locales in the United States. About 10 percent of the people in the Los Angeles region are illegally in the United States—meaning about 2 million illegal immigrants out of a total population of 20 million.
Not surprisingly given those extraordinary numbers, U. S. immigration officers have prioritized immigration enforcement in the Los Angeles area. The Government sometimes makes brief investigative stops to check the immigration status of those who gather in locations where people are hired for day jobs; who work or appear to work in jobs such as construction, landscaping, agriculture, or car washes that often do not require paperwork and are therefore attractive to illegal immigrants; and who do not speak much if any English. If the officers learn that the individual they stopped is a U. S. citizen or otherwise lawfully in the United States, they promptly let the individual go. If the individual is illegally in the United States, the officers may arrest the individual and initiate the process for removal...
To stop an individual for brief questioning about immigration status, the Government must have reasonable suspicion that the individual is illegally present in the United States... Reasonable suspicion is a lesser requirement than probable cause and “considerably short” of the preponderance of the evidence standard... Whether an officer has reasonable suspicion depends on the totality of the circumstances... Here, those circumstances include: that there is an extremely high number and percentage of illegal immigrants in the Los Angeles area; that those individuals tend to gather in certain locations to seek daily work; that those individuals often work in certain kinds of jobs, such as day labor, landscaping, agriculture, and construction, that do not require paperwork and are therefore especially attractive to illegal immigrants; and that many of those illegally in the Los Angeles area come from Mexico or Central America and do not speak much English... To be clear, apparent ethnicity alone cannot furnish reasonable suspicion; under this Court’s case law regarding immigration stops, however, it can be a “relevant factor” when considered along with other salient factors.
Under this Court’s precedents, not to mention common sense, those circumstances taken together can constitute at least reasonable suspicion of illegal presence in the United States. Importantly, reasonable suspicion means only that immigration officers may briefly stop the individual and inquire about immigration status. If the person is a U. S. citizen or otherwise lawfully in the United States, that individual will be free to go after the brief encounter. Only if the person is illegally in the United States may the stop lead to further immigration proceedings.
Basically, he's saying it's illegal to base a stop on someone's ethnicity alone. However, that combined with factors like limited English and other factors might be enough. The three liberal Justices dissented. They argued that the stops in question were not brief questions but essentially armed arrests.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor called the decision “yet another grave misuse of our emergency docket. We should not have to live in a country where the Government can seize anyone who looks Latino, speaks Spanish, and appears to work a low wage job. Rather than stand idly by while our constitutional freedoms are lost, I dissent.”
“The Government ... has all but declared that all Latinos, U.S. 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,” Sotomayor wrote...
“Immigration agents are not conducting ‘brief stops for questioning,’ as the concurrence would like to believe. They are seizing people using firearms, physical violence, and warehouse detentions,” she wrote. “Nor are undocumented immigrants the only ones harmed by the Government’s conduct. United States citizens are also being seized, taken from their jobs, and prevented from working to support themselves and their families.”
This is another big win for the Trump administration which had backed off from immigration enforcement in LA in keeping with this decision. Presumably, enforcement in LA will now ramp back up while the underlying case continues to make its way through the courts.
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