Feds can't escape suit over illegal ICE stops around LA

LOS ANGELES (CN) — The U.S. Department of Homeland Security will likely be forced to face claims that Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents are violating the constitutional rights of Latinos who are detained in Southern California simply because of their race and working-class appearance.

At a hearing Thursday in Los Angeles, U.S. District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong tentatively denied the government’s request to dismiss the lawsuit brought last year by workers’ and immigrants’ rights groups as well as by individual LA County residents in the wake of the unprecedented immigration crackdown President Donald Trump unleashed in the region.

The judge, a Joe Biden appointee, also tentatively denied Homeland Security’s bid to dismiss the claims by 22 local cities that joined the lawsuit, saying the ICE raids caused a loss in their tax revenue as people have become fearful to go to stores, saddling them with the costs of responding to the unrest caused by the crackdown.

Frimpong didn’t issue a final decision at the hearing but vowed to do so in due time.

While Justice Department attorney Jonathan Ross sought to argue that the plaintiffs lacked standing because the purported civil rights violations were “isolated incidents” and there was no evidence they faced imminent harm, the judge indicated she was more inclined to believe the violations were a widespread problem.

Likewise, the judge seemed unpersuaded that the evidence from civil rights violations last summer had become stale.

“Any case challenging stops would involve past encounters,” Frimpong noted.

Frimpong last year issued a temporary restraining order that barred ICE from apprehending people based only on their work, appearance, language or location, without a reasonable suspicion that they are in the country without proper authorization. Such stops violate local residents’ Fourth Amendment rights to be free of unreasonable searches and seizures.

The order only pertained to the Central District of California, the federal judicial district that includes LA County as well as six surrounding counties.

While the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the government’s request to stay that temporary restraining order, the U.S. Supreme Court stepped in and paused it last September.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh said that about 2 million people, or 10% of the total population of the LA region, lacked legal immigration status and that is was no surprise that ICE had prioritized its enforcement activities there. Moreover, according to Kavanaugh, it was common sense that ICE agents would stop and question people at locations where people without proper immigration status gathered to seek work.

Ross argued that the Supreme Court judge’s observations, while not binding since it wasn’t a final judgment of the court, were nevertheless persuasive and supported the government’s bid to dismiss the Fourth Amendment claims.

Aniello DeSimone, another Justice Department attorney, urged the judge to dismiss the claims by the 22 cities intervening in the case, saying that so-called sanctuary cities were themselves to blame for any disruptions caused by immigration enforcement.

“Intervenors have a policy of attracting illegal aliens to their communities,” he said. “As a result they are invested in trying to thwart immigration law.”

In response, Martin Estrada, a former U.S. attorney for the LA region who is representing the cities in the lawsuit, rejected the argument that the financial burden of the ICE raids was a result of the municipalities’ own choices.

“What we have here is a campaign to militarize immigration enforcement,” Estrada said. “They are kidnapping people in the streets.”

He added that, while the claims in the cities’ complaint pertained only to last summer, as the case progresses and the plaintiffs gather more evidence, their case that ICE has a policy to target people because they are working-class Latinos will only because stronger.

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