President Donald Trump’s administration urged the Supreme Court on Thursday to allow immigration enforcement officials to continue what critics describe as “roving patrols” in Southern California that lower courts said likely violated the 4th Amendment.
At issue were a series of incidents in which masked and heavily armed Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents pulled aside people who identify as Latino – including some US citizens – around Los Angeles to interrogate them about their immigration status. Lower courts found that the agency likely had not established the “reasonable suspicion” required to justify those stops.
A US District Court last month ordered the Department of Homeland Security to discontinue the practice if the stops were based largely on a person’s apparent ethnicity, language or their presence at a particular location, such as a farm or bus stop. The 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals largely upheld that decision, which applied only to seven central California counties.
The Trump administration urged the high court to block that decision as it continues to aggressively crack down on illegal immigration.
“No one thinks that speaking Spanish or working in construction always creates reasonable suspicion,” the Justice Department told the Supreme Court. “But in many situations, such factors – alone or in combination – can heighten the likelihood that someone is unlawfully present in the United States.”
Immigration agents, the Justice Department said, should be “entitled to rely on these factors when ramping up enforcement of immigration laws.”
Five individuals and three immigration advocacy groups sued over the patrols.
The case is the latest of nearly two dozen emergency appeals the administration has filed at the Supreme Court since Trump began his second term in January. Many of those have dealt with Trump’s immigration policies. The Supreme Court will likely deal with the emergency appeal in the next several weeks.
In siding against Trump, US District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong said the administration was attempting to convince the court “in the face of a mountain of evidence” that none of the plaintiffs’ claim’s were true.
Frimpong, appointed by President Joe Biden, said in her ruling that the court needed to decide whether the plaintiffs could prove that the Trump administration “is indeed conducting roving patrols without reasonable suspicion and denying access to lawyers.”
“This court decides – based on all the evidence presented – that they are,” Frimpong wrote.
In its appeal Thursday, the administration argued lower courts weighing the case had flouted the Supreme Court’s decision in late June that limited the ability of lower courts to issue sweeping orders blocking a president’s agenda.
“Rather than limiting relief to the named respondents, the court enjoined the government as to any detentive stops of anyone among the 20 million inhabitants of the Central District of California – whether those stops affect respondents or not,” the administration said.
But the 9th Circuit concluded that Frimpong’s decision was in bounds. To start with, the appeals court said, the geographic impact Frimpong’s order was limited. It also only incidentally affected the non-named parties, the court reasoned.
And any other outcome, the appeals court wrote, would be unworkable.
“How would a federal agent who is about to detain a person whose identity is not known,” the court asked, “discern in advance whether that person is on the list of individuals” who sued.
CNN’s Kaanita Iyer contributed to this report.
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