ACLU sues Trump administration over Los Angeles immigration raids

LOS ANGELES (CN) — Five Southern California residents and three advocacy groups, including United Farm Workers, sued the Trump administration on Wednesday over what they called “unlawful stop and arrest practices” and “illegal conditions of confinement” during the recent spate of immigration sweeps.

“Since June 6th, marauding, masked goons have descended upon Los Angeles, terrorizing our brown communities and tearing up the Constitution in the process,” Mohammad Tajsar of the American Civil Liberties Union, which is representing the plaintiffs, said in a written statement. “No matter their status or the color of their skin, everyone is guaranteed Constitutional rights to protect them from illegal stops."

The immigration sweeps by United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement have been carried out all over California, but have been heavily focused on Southern California and the LA area. They triggered massive protests and civil unrest — President Donald Trump, in response, ordered thousands of National Guards and 700 Marines into the city to maintain order.

According to the Department of Homeland Security, 1,618 immigrants were arrested for deportation last month. Stories have spread of ICE agents raiding Home Depot parking lots and car washes. A number of Fourth of July events scheduled for Friday, including one in East LA, were recently canceled for fear that they would become targets of ICE raids.

“Masked federal agents, sometimes dressed in military-style clothing, have conducted indiscriminate immigration operations, flooding street corners, bus stops, parking lots, agricultural sites, day laborer corners, and other places, setting up checkpoints, and entering businesses, interrogating residents as they are working, looking for work, or otherwise trying to go about their daily lives, and taking people away,” plaintiffs write in their federal class action filed in federal court in the Central District of California.

The plaintiffs say the raids violate California and U.S. laws against warrantless arrests. They also bring claims for violations of the Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable seizures and Fifth Amendment rights to due process and access to counsel.

The raids, the plaintiffs say, follow a pattern: “Individuals with brown skin are approached or pulled aside by unidentified federal agents, suddenly and with a show of force, and made to answer questions about who they are and where they are from. If they hesitate, attempt to leave, or do not answer the questions to the satisfaction of the agents, they are detained, sometimes tackled, handcuffed, and/or taken into custody. In these interactions, agents typically have no prior information about the individual and no warrant of any kind … Also contrary to federal law, the agents do not identify themselves or explain why the individual is being arrested.”

Arrestees, the plaintiffs say, are being housed in “a short- term processing center and ICE basement holding area in downtown Los Angeles known as ‘B-18’” for days at a time.

“In these dungeon-like facilities, conditions are deplorable and unconstitutional. The government has also unlawfully deprived those arrested of access to counsel. Under such conditions, some of those arrested are pressured into accepting voluntary departure,” the plaintiffs say.

Among the five individual Latino plaintiffs, three say in the complaint that they are day laborers who are still detained in B-18. Two other plaintiffs say they have been frequently stopped and questioned by ICE officers. The individual plaintiffs and United Farm Workers are joined by the Los Angeles Worker Center Network, the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, and the Immigrant Defenders Law Center.

The plaintiffs cite media reports of a 3,000 arrestees-per-day quota imposed by Homeland Security on its agents. According to those reports, agents were told not to conduct long-term investigations, but instead to simply round up day laborers looking for work at Home Depots, or even people hanging outside convenience stores.

“Members of the Southern California community have been whisked away and disappeared into a grossly overcrowded dungeon-like facility lacking food, medical care, basic hygiene, and beds,” said another plaintiffs’ attorney, Mark Rosenbaum of Public Counsel, in a written statement. “The objective of this draconian crackdown is to eviscerate basic rights to due process and to shield from public view the horrifying ways ICE and Border Patrol agents treat citizens and residents who have been stigmatized by our government as violent criminals based on skin color alone."

The plaintiffs name Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, among other federal enforcement officials, as defendants. Among other things, the plaintiffs seek an injunction barring the federal government from transferring arrestees outside the jurisdiction while awaiting their removal hearings. They also want a federal judge to declare that the practice of making warrantless arrests without individualized flight risk determinations is illegal.

On Monday, the federal government sued the city of Los Angeles in an effort to block its sanctuary city ordinance, which prevents police from cooperating with the immigration crackdown.

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