Federal Appeals Court Upholds Block on Indiscriminate Immigration Sweeps
Aug. 5-- The three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in Los Angeles Aug. 1 issued a ruling which upheld a lower court’s temporary order blocking the Trump administration from conducting indiscriminate immigration stops and arrests in Southern California. This upholds the July 11 ruling by federal Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong which prohibits the federal government from the racial profiling of detaining people solely based on their clothing, ethnic background, speaking with an accent, presence at particular locations, or type of work that one does. The ruling applies to seven counties in southern California: Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara and Ventura.
The three-judge panel, comprised of Ronald Gould, Marsha Berzon and Jennifer Sung, wrote that it was important to note that the government never disputed that the stops “have been based solely on the four enumerated factors” of race, language, location and job. “They did not challenge the district court’s findings that those stops are part of a pattern of conduct that has apparent official approval. And, finally, they did not meaningfully dispute the district court’s conclusion that sole reliance on the four enumerated factors, alone or in combination, does not satisfy the constitutional requirement of reasonable suspicion.”
The judges, two appointed by President Bill Clinton and the third by President Joe Biden, also wrote that the government could not show sufficient reason that such unconstitutional behavior would continue without this restraining order. The original case involved five individuals, two of whom are U.S. citizens, and one of whom had been detained twice in a ten-day period.
ACLU attorney Mark Rosenbaum wrote in a statement that “These raids were unconstitutional, unsupported by evidence, and rooted in fear and harmful stereotypes, not public safety.” Rosenbaum added that the ruling, “sends a powerful message: The government cannot excuse illegal conduct by relying on racial profiling as a tool of immigration enforcement.”
Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin issued a statement which accused “unelected judges” of “undermining the will of the American people.”
On Aug. 1, in a separate case in Washington, D.C., U.S. District Judge Jia M. Cobb issued a ruling that blocks the government’s “expedited removal” of deporting individuals without a full hearing who have a temporary legal status. This applies to thousands of migrants who are primarily from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. They have been allowed to temporarily legally work and live in the United States, but in March, the Trump administration revoked their legal status. This ruling should halt the recent escalation of immigration arrests outside of courtrooms as these individuals attend their scheduled immigration hearings.
“Expedited removal” comes from the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act which did not eliminate due process, but allowed migrants who were stopped within 100 miles of a U.S. border and have been in the country for less that 14 days to be “fast-tracked” for deportation. However, the Trump administration expanded the border policy to include the entire country and applied to individuals in the country for up to two years.
The ACLU has argued that this expanded expedited removal violates due process requirements and also fails to give a reasonable notice to the migrant or even the opportunity to challenge it. Kathleen Bush-Joseph, an attorney at the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute said, “The Trump administration is trying to avoid the immigration court backlog of almost 4 million pending cases, and it’s doing that by using expedited removal. So if it’s blocked from using expedited removal in the interior and it needs to put even more people into the immigration court backlog, that’s really going to slow down the mass deportation effort and it could be a major frustration for them.”