LOS ANGELES (AP) — A federal appeals court on Friday night upheld a lower court’s temporary injunction that blocks the Trump administration from carrying out indiscriminate detentions and arrests of immigrants in Southern California.
A three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit of the United States Court of Appeals held a Monday afternoon hearing in which the federal government urged the court to overturn the temporary restraining order issued July 12 by Judge Maame E. Frimpong, arguing that it hindered immigration enforcement.
Last month, immigrant-rights groups filed a lawsuit accusing the Trump administration of systematically targeting people of color in Southern California during its crackdown on illegal immigration. The complaint named three detained immigrants and two U.S. citizens as plaintiffs.
In her order, Frimpong noted a “mountain of evidence” that federal immigration enforcement tactics violated the Constitution. She also argued that the government cannot rely on factors such as apparent race or ethnicity, speaking Spanish or English with an accent, being at a place like a vehicle depot or a car wash, or a person’s occupation as the sole basis for reasonable suspicion leading to detention.
The appellate panel agreed and questioned the need for the administration to oppose an order that prevents it from violating the Constitution.
“If, as the defendants suggest, they are not making detentions that lack reasonable justification, they can hardly claim irreparable harm from a court order aimed at preventing a subset of detentions not supported by reasonable suspicion,” the judges wrote.
A hearing on a preliminary injunction, which would be a more substantial court order as the suit progresses, is scheduled for September.
The Los Angeles area has been a battleground with the White House over its aggressive immigration strategy, prompting protests and the deployment of the National Guard and Marines for several weeks. Federal agents have arrested undocumented immigrants in locations such as Home Depot stores, car washes, bus stops, and farms. Many of those detained had lived in the United States for decades.
One of the plaintiffs is Brian Gavidia, a Los Angeles resident who appears in a video recorded by a friend on June 13 during his detention by federal agents as he cried, “I was born here, in the United States, in East L.A., man!”
They want “to send us back to a world where an American citizen… can be detained, pushed against a fence and have his phone and ID taken away just because he was working at a vehicle depot in a Latino neighborhood,” said Mohammad Tajsar, staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union, to the court on Monday.
The federal government argued that it had not had enough time to gather and present evidence, since the suit was filed just before the July 4 holiday and the hearing took place the following week.
“It would be a very serious assertion to claim that multiple federal agencies have a policy of violating the Constitution,” said attorney Jacob Roth.
It also argued that the lower court’s order was too broad and that immigration activists did not present enough evidence to show that the government had an official policy of detaining people without reasonable suspicion.
It referred to the four factors — race, language, presence in a place, and occupation — listed in the temporary restraining order to argue that the court should not be able to prohibit the government from using them. It also claimed that the scope of what is legally permissible was unclear.
“Legally, I think it is appropriate to rely on the reasonable-suspicion factors,” Roth asserted.
The judges pressed the government vigorously on its arguments.
“No one has suggested that they cannot consider these factors at all,” said Judge Jennifer Sung.
“However, those factors alone merely constitute a broad profile and do not satisfy the reasonable-suspicion standard to detain someone,” she added.
Sung, named by former President Joe Biden, said that in a region like Los Angeles, where Latinos comprise about half the population, those factors “cannot rule out those who are undocumented and those who are legally documented.”
“What harm is there in saying that you will not do something you say you are not doing?” the judge asked.
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass called the decision a “victory for the rule of law” and said the city would protect residents from “racial discrimination and other unlawful tactics” used by federal agents.
