Supreme Court undoes LA judge’s order blocking ICE actions

WASHINGTON, D.C. - The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled a Biden-appointed federal judge overreached when she all but shut down ICE immigration enforcement actions in California, undoing temporary restraining orders she entered against federal agents.

The court’s majority did not explain its reasoning. However, one of the members of the court's majority said agents can't be barred from using race or apparent ethnicity in stopping and questioning possible illegal immigrants, as long as they can provide other reasons for making the stop or detaining a person.

In a special concurring opinion, one of the court's conservative justices also particularly noted that judges, who have in the past refused to force Democratic presidents to more strenuously enforce immigration law, should take care now not to restrict federal immigration law enforcement under President Donald Trump, lest the courts be used to help illegal immigrants evade the law altogether.

On Sept. 8, the high court ruled 6-3 in favor of the Trump administration in its legal battle with illegal immigrant rights activists, who sought to secure court orders blocking U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement from carrying out the kinds of immigration enforcement actions and raids.

The ruling overturned orders issued in July by U.S. District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong.

Frimpong was appointed to the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California in Los Angeles by former President Joe Biden. Under the Biden administration, immigration enforcement was sharply relaxed, allowing millions of illegal immigrants to enter the U.S.

The case had landed before Frimpong in early July, when a group of immigrant workers and immigrant rights advocacy groups filed suit against federal agencies for allegedly "abducting and disappearing community members using unlawful stop-and-arrest practices" and confining them in allegedly illegal conditions.

Among other groups, the ACLU Foundation of Southern California provided legal representation to the plaintiffs.

In a public statement, an ACLU attorney described ICE agents as "marauding bands of masked, rifle-toting goons."

A day after the lawsuit was filed, Frimpong issued an order restraining federal agencies from continuing the allegedly illegal enforcement activities, asserting she also believed ICE's "roving patrols" had acted unconstitutionally, allegedly violating immigrants Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights.

She specifically prohibited ICE agents from allegedly illegally identifying people to stop and question, allegedly using race and apparent ethnicity as the sole determining factors.

She further threatened sanctions against agents accused by detainees of violating her order.

In response, the Justice Department appealed, arguing Frimpong's ruling would threaten to force the end of immigration enforcement tactics that have endured for decades and would "impose a strait-jacket" on federal immigration enforcement.

"The result is a sweeping, district-wide injunction that threatens to hobble lawful immigration enforcement by hanging a Damocles sword of contempt over every immigration stop," the Justice Department said in an appellate filing, seeking to stay Frimpong's restraining order while the greater case continued.

The matter eventually landed before the U.S. Supreme Court. On Sept. 8, the court’s conservative majority put Frimpong's order on hold.

The majority did not explain its reasoning in the 6-3 ruling.

However, in a concurring opinion, Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh said he believed the case was ultimately an easy one to decide in favor of the federal agencies.

Kavanaugh noted that Frimpong's orders would make it all but impossible for federal agents to carry out legitimate immigration enforcement actions in a part of the country - the Los Angeles area - in which illegal immigrants make up a huge portion of the population, perhaps as much as 10 percent or more.

He specifically said race or apparent ethnicity can be used by agents as a factor in determining who to stop and question, as long as it is one of several factors that, when taken together, can create "reasonable suspicion" that someone may be in the country illegally.

"Whether an officer has reasonable suspicion depends on the totality of the circumstances," Kavanaugh wrote.

"Here, those circumstances include: that there is an extremely high number and percentage of illegal immigrants in the Los Angeles area; that those individuals tend to gather in certain locations to seek daily work; that those individuals often work in certain kinds of jobs, such as day labor, landscaping, agriculture, and construction, that do not require paperwork and are therefore especially attractive to illegal immigrants; and that many of those illegally in the Los Angeles area come from Mexico or Central America and do not speak much English.

"To be clear, apparent ethnicity alone cannot furnish reasonable suspicion; under this Court’s case law regarding immigration stops, however, it can be a 'relevant factor' when considered along with other salient factors."

Kavanaugh said siding against the government in this case would upend decades of legal precedent under which ICE's tactics have been refined and upheld as constitutional.

While those detained by ICE remain able to sue for excessive use of force or other alleged violations of their rights, Kavanaugh said, in the end, immigrants who have entered the U.S. illegally have still violated the law and do not have a right to be free from suspicion by federal agents or from immigration enforcement actions.

"The interests of individuals who are illegally in the country in avoiding being stopped by law enforcement for questioning is ultimately an interest in evading the law," Kavanaugh wrote. "That is not an especially weighty legal interest.

"To be sure, I recognize and fully appreciate that many (not all, but many) illegal immigrants come to the United States to escape poverty and the lack of freedom and opportunities in their home countries, and to make better lives for themselves and their families. And I understand that they may feel somewhat misled by the varying U. S. approaches to immigration enforcement over the last few decades.

"But the fact remains that, under the laws passed by Congress and the President, they are acting illegally by remaining in the United States...," Kavanaugh wrote.

The court's three liberal justices dissented from the decision.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor authored the dissent, joined by justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

In the dissent, Sotomayor argued ICE should be remain blocked indefinitely from carrying out much of its immigration enforcement work, while the legal challenge wends its way through the court system over ensuing months and years.

She asserted that allowing ICE's current operations to continue could expose millions of Hispanic or Latino residents of southern California, in particular, to questioning and potential detention, including immigrants in the country legally and potentially U.S. citizens, as well.

Sotomayor asserted Frimpong's order does not hamstring immigration enforcement, because agents are still able to conduct seizures and raids at "particular" workplaces where the agents have collected "intelligence" that illegal immigrants have been employed, in violation of U.S. law.

"We should not have to live in a country where the Government can seize anyone who looks Latino, speaks Spanish, and appears to work a low wage job. Rather than stand idly by while our constitutional freedoms are lost, I dissent," Sotomayor wrote.