By Andrew Chung and Jan Wolfe
(Reuters) -President Donald Trump’s administration on Thursday asked the U.S. Supreme Court to lift a lower court order that barred U.S. government agents from making immigration-related arrests in Los Angeles based on tactics that critics have called racial profiling.
In an emergency filing, the Justice Department asked the high court to halt a judge’s order that temporarily blocked agents from stopping or detaining people without “reasonable suspicion” that they are in the country illegally, by relying solely on their race or ethnicity, or if they speak Spanish or English with an accent. The judge’s order applied to her court’s jurisdiction over much of Southern California.
“The district court’s injunction now significantly interferes with federal enforcement efforts across a region that is larger and more populous than many countries and that has become a major epicenter of the immigration crisis,” the Justice Department said in the filing.
Trump won back the White House promising record-level deportations. His administration’s immigration raids, including in Los Angeles, have sparked panic in immigrant communities as well as widespread protests, and drawn lawsuits over aggressive tactics carried out by masked and armed federal enforcement agents.
In May, Stephen Miller, a senior Trump aide and the architect of the Republican president’s immigration agenda, demanded Immigration and Customs Enforcement leaders ramp up deportations, setting a goal of 3,000 arrests per day.
Trump called National Guard troops and U.S. Marines into Los Angeles in June in response to protests against the immigration raids, marking an extraordinary use of military force to support civilian police operations within the United States.
Local officials and California Governor Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, sharply contested the deployment of troops, saying they were not needed and only served to inflame tensions.
A group of Latino individuals caught up in the raids, including U.S. citizens, mounted a proposed class action lawsuit against administration officials in Los Angeles federal court in July. One plaintiff, Jason Gavidia, claimed agents roughed him up after disbelieving his pleas that he is a citizen, demanding to know what hospital he was born in.
The lawsuit said the “indiscriminate” raids, interrogations and detentions violate the U.S. Constitution’s Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable searches and seizures. “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,” the lawsuit stated.
U.S. District Judge Maame Frimpong agreed, finding that the officials’ actions likely violate the Fourth Amendment. She issued a temporary restraining order halting agents from using race or ethnicity, language, presence at a particular location such as a car wash or tow yard, or type of work, to carry out stops or arrests, as none of those factors alone can establish “reasonable suspicion” of illegality.
The San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals denied the administration’s request to lift Frimpong’s order on August 1.
(Reporting by Andrew Chung and Jan Wolfe)
