Federal Court Says ICE Can’t Round Up People Just Because They Seem Vaguely Foreign

Legal Issues

from the get-something-more-probable-for-your-'cause' dept

The Supreme Court may have suddenly decided nationwide injunctions are bad now that they’re bad for Trump, but it will need to cook up new arguments if it hopes to allow the open racism of its mass deportation program to continue in California.

Trump has sent the National Guard and Marines to California to be performative about bigotry, but none of that “assist federal operations” bullshit will mean anything if the original federal operation has been (mostly) grounded by a federal court.

Sure, ICE and its military cohorts may have made a show of force in search of rain-soaked baked goods, but this recent order from a federal court means federal officers are going to have to find something better to do with their time than raid local swap meets in hopes of finding someone vaguely Mexican.

A federal judge on Friday ruled that immigration officers in Southern California can’t rely solely on someone’s race or the fact that they’re speaking Spanish to stop and detain them.

U.S. District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong issued a temporary restraining order after a lawsuit was filed by three men who were arrested as they waited to be picked up at a Pasadena bus stop for jobs on June 18, and after two others were stopped and questioned despite saying they are U.S. citizens.

Frimpong’s order bars the detention of people unless the officer or agent “has reasonable suspicion that the person to be stopped is within the United States in violation of U.S. immigration law.”

This may only apply to the central district of California, but that’s where a whole lot of ICE action is taking place. The decision [PDF] acknowledges several things before moving on to chastise the government for its clearly racist behavior.

First, it says the government has a right to engage in large-scale immigration enforcement efforts. Then it points out all the stuff that governs large-scale enforcement efforts… you know, small things like the Fourth and Fifth Amendment, as well as the long-accepted illegality of targeting people simply because of their perceived race.

The court recites the facts:

Agents and officers approach suddenly and in large numbers in military style or SWAT clothing, heavily armed with weapons displayed, masked, and with their vest displaying a generic “POLICE” patch (if any display at all). Agents typically position themselves around individuals, aggressively engage them, and/or shout commands, making it nearly impossible for individuals to answer their questions. When individuals have tried to avoid an encounter with agents and officers, they have been followed and pushed to the ground, sometimes even beaten, and then taken away.

This isn’t how law enforcement interactions are supposed to be initiated, especially when there’s no probable cause to believe anyone being accosted is dangerous, much less suspected of committing a serious crime. These “encounters” are routinely followed by arrests and detention in undermanned facilities that cannot provide basic human necessities like water, food, or other humane considerations.

ICE has a “policy and practice” of denying due process rights and “effectuating warrantless arrests” without making the proper flight risk determinations. Officers also refuse to identify themselves, the reason for the arrest, or anything else related to the constitutional rights they’re supposed to respect.

The court says ICE can continue to carry out its mass enforcement effort. But it will have to respect the law and the Constitution while doing it. The ACLU — representing several people who have been indiscriminately “targeted” by ICE — gets a win, for now.

The court notes ICE has been denying detainees access to legal counsel, along with other routine rights violations, which leads to this footnote that clearly demonstrates just how shitty ICE is when it comes to preventing people they’re absconding with from communicating with anyone, especially their legal representatives.

During the hearing, Defendants contended that because normal operations at B-18 [detention center] have resumed, there is no likelihood that the Access/Detention plaintiffs would again be sprayed or honked at. This argument misses the point. At issue are the denial of access to counsel and interference with the [Plaintiffs’] core missions, not that the attorneys were sprayed or honked at (although one would hope not to be sprayed or honked at during the course of their job.)

Yeah… I mean, one would hope. This is still America for the moment, at least. This refers to immigration attorneys being attacked with pepper spray when attempting to talk to their detained clients. Other attorneys reported ICE vehicle drivers attempted to drown out shouted communications to arrested individuals by laying on the horn any time they heard anyone outside of the vehicles talking to anyone inside them.

For 52 pages, the government does nothing but lose, leading to things you would never expect to hear from a federal court until exactly this moment in time.

Like:

Second, the Court considers whether speaking Spanish or speaking English with an accent could give rise to reasonable suspicion. There is no case law that supports that it could.

And:

Although Patrol Agent in Charge Harvick indicates that “past experiences have demonstrated that illegal aliens utilize and seek work at “certain types of businesses, including car washes,” this is insufficient to make these factors fit the particularized assessment needed. […] Although the agent in that case had experience that work crews “on occasion included illegal aliens,” they did not provide any evidence about how many local work crews did not. Nor did they have any information about the employer of the specific work crew at issue. In the same vein, knowledge that undocumented individuals use and seek work at car washes falls woefully short of the reasonable suspicion needed to target any particular individual at any particular car wash.

Also:

Lastly, at least one news article reports that people were dragged out of bathrooms at a swap meet, which makes Defendants’ arguments that their stops and arrests are consensual unpersuasive.

Given all of this, the court comes down on the side of the Constitution. It blocks ICE from doing the usual ICE bullshit in this district. Detainees are to be given access to legal representation for at least eight hours a day (Monday-Friday) and four hours a day on weekends and holidays while being held at B-18.

And the flow of people to B-18 should start to dry up, thanks to additional mandates from the court. The court says ICE officers need reasonable suspicion to perform stops (and probable cause after that to perform arrests). And reasonable suspicion definitely isn’t whatever the fuck ICE has been doing so far in California or in the rest of the United States, for that matter.

Defendants may not rely solely on the factors below, alone or in combination, to form reasonable suspicion for a detentive stop, except as permitted by law:

i. Apparent race or ethnicity;
ii. Speaking Spanish or speaking English with an accent;
iii. Presence at a particular location (e.g. bus stop, car wash, tow yard, day laborer pick up site, agricultural site, etc.) or;
iv. The type of work one does.

It all adds up to this astoundingly simple statement, albeit one that law enforcement routinely believes to be false: racism isn’t reasonable suspicion. But this administration can’t hit its anti-white quotas without it (and by “it,” I mean open racism), so it will be appealed endlessly as ICE continues to roam the streets like criminals in search of victims.

Filed Under: 4th amendment, 5th amendment, biased policing, california, dhs, due process, mass deportation, racism