Two novel challenges to the Trump administration were filed this week in Los Angeles, highlighting the tactics of federal officers in Southern California that immigrant rights groups and ordinary citizens say have been excessive, sometimes brutal and often unconstitutional.
Immigrant rights groups filed suit in federal court on Wednesday to halt what they described as unlawful enforcement actions in Southern California that include racial profiling, warrantless arrests and denying access to counsel to people held in a “dungeonlike” facility.
In a different claim, filed with federal immigration agencies late Tuesday, Job Garcia, an American citizen, said federal officers in Los Angeles tackled and wrongfully detained him for more than 24 hours after he recorded masked border agents conducting a raid. He is seeking $1 million in damages for economic losses and personal injury.
The cases are among the first challenges against dragnet tactics that have stunned immigrant communities and captured the attention of many Americans, as the Trump administration escalates its crackdown. Even a group of Republican lawmakers in California recently joined others urging President Trump to train Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other Department of Homeland Security agents on violent criminals.
“We urge you to direct ICE and D.H.S. to focus their enforcement operations on criminal immigrants,” the Republican state lawmakers wrote, “and when possible, avoid the kinds of sweeping raids that instill fear and disrupt the workplace.”
Ernest Herrera, a lawyer with the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, which filed Mr. Garcia’s claim, said the civil right group wanted “to put a stop to Trump’s campaign of terror on U.S. citizens who are exercising their rights.”
The lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, filed before dawn on Wednesday in federal court in Los Angeles, accuses the Trump administration of unleashing “indiscriminate immigration operations” that have ensnared day laborers, carwash workers, farm workers, caregivers and others described as “the lifeblood of communities across Southern California.”
“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 claim said.
Both cases could have implications for how federal immigration agents are allowed to conduct operations in Los Angeles, home to the largest undocumented population in the United States. More broadly, they open a new legal battle over the Trump administration’s nationwide crackdown.
A judgment in the A.C.L.U. suit would not be binding on other cities, said Mark Rosenbaum, a lawyer with the nonprofit firm Public Counsel and a counsel in that case. But, he predicted, “it will have national reverberations.”
Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, called the accusations “disgusting and categorically FALSE” in an emailed response.
“These type of smears are designed to demonize and villainize our brave ICE law enforcement,” she wrote, referring to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “This kind of garbage has led to a more than 700 percent increase in the assaults on enforcement officers.”
In his administrative claim and in an interview, Mr. Garcia, 37, a doctoral student and delivery driver, said he was picking up orders at Home Depot stores on June 19, when he saw masked agents at a store in Hollywood sweep into the parking lot and block off entrances.
Mr. Garcia’s shaky footage captured four or five officers approaching a driver sitting inside a commercial truck. One broke the man’s window with a baton as another reached to open the door, his video shows.
According to his claim, Mr. Garcia and other bystanders tried to tell the driver that he did not have to open the door or the window and that he had a right to keep silent. One agent lunged at Mr. Garcia, grabbed his phone and threw him to the ground. Officers then put him on his stomach and held down his legs, placing their knees on his back and “pressing his face into the asphalt,” the claim states. Mr. Garcia said he struggled to breathe and believed he might die.
“I was totally in shock,” Mr. Garcia said in an interview.
The A.C.L.U. lawsuit accuses immigration agents of just such actions, which it says “look less like lawful arrests and more like brazen, midday kidnappings.”
The lawsuit, which includes five named immigrants as plaintiffs, said that Los Angeles and surrounding counties had been “under siege” as the administration strives to achieve a White House quota of 3,000 arrests a day nationally.
The arrests have been “guised as a crackdown on the worst of the worst,” according to the suit. But, it continued, most of the “individuals stopped and arrested in the raids have not been targeted in any meaningful sense of the word at all, except on the basis of their skin color and occupation.”
In his claim, Mr. Garcia said he was handcuffed and taken to Los Angeles Dodgers Stadium grounds, where he heard “agents boast about how many ‘bodies’ they nabbed that day.” After the Dodgers denied the agency access to its parking lots, Mr. Garcia said, he was taken to the federal Metropolitan Detention Center in downtown Los Angeles, where he was held for hours.
Ms. McLaughlin, the D.H.S. spokeswoman, said Mr. Garcia was arrested after he “assaulted and verbally harassed a Border Patrol agent.” She called enforcement operations “highly targeted,” with officers doing “their due diligence.”
The litigants in the Los Angeles civil suit include Public Counsel, the A.C.L.U. of Southern California, the Immigrant Rights Clinic at the University of California, Irvine’s law school and private law firms. They are seeking a preliminary injunction to stop the sweeps and hold the government accountable for detention conditions that have deteriorated as arrests have swelled, according to former detainees, lawyers and immigrant rights advocates.
Immigrants have been detained for extended periods in “dungeonlike” facilities, such as a basement intended for brief stays solely for intake, the suit says. In “deplorable” conditions, according to the lawsuit, the government has deprived those arrested access to lawyers, and some immigrants have been pressured into accepting swift deportation.
Again, Ms. McLaughlin called the accusations untrue, saying detainees are receiving “the best health care than many aliens have received in their entire live” and meals “certified by dieticians.”
“In fact, ICE has higher detention standards than most U.S. prisons that hold actual U.S. citizens,” she wrote.
Pedro Vasquez, a plaintiff in the lawsuit, said he was waiting for a ride to work on June 18 in Pasadena, Calif., when half a dozen armed, masked agents jumped out of four cars and began grabbing people. Mr. Vasquez, 54, was arrested without a warrant, according to the lawsuit. He has lived in the United States for more than two decades, according to interviews with his sister, who described the episode as a kidnapping.
The lawsuit depicts the raids in Southern California as part of a coordinated attack on so-called sanctuary jurisdictions, which limit cooperation with federal immigration enforcement.
On Monday, the Trump administration sued Los Angeles over its sanctuary policy, stating that it is unconstitutional and hinders federal immigration enforcement. The lawsuit claims the city’s sanctuary status fueled unrest, which necessitated the deployment of the National Guard and U.S. Marines “to quell the chaos.” Protests erupted in downtown Los Angeles after agents arrested 40 workers at a garment warehouse last month.
ICE has historically been the agency responsible for arrests of unauthorized immigrants. But in Southern California, the federal government has deployed the Border Patrol, the F.B.I. and the Drug Enforcement Administration to assist.
The lawsuit accuses the El Centro sector of the Border Patrol, based more than 200 miles from Los Angeles, of relying on race or ethnicity while conducting warrantless raids and stops.
In April, a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction barring the Border Patrol from engaging in such practices, but last month, Gregory Bovino, the C.B.P. chief of the sector who is named in the suit, vowed that his agents would continue to operate in the Los Angeles.
Immigrants make up more than 30 percent of the population in Los Angeles County, where nearly half of all residents are Latino.
Both actions this week underscored that even legal permanent residents and U.S. citizens are not immune from the crackdown.
Mr. Garcia, who studies religion at Claremont Graduate University, said he took the first step toward legal action to restore his own faith in the country’s system of laws and to protect the next generation of Latinos, including his young nieces and nephew.
“I do not want them to ever feel unsafe in the country they were born and belong simply because of how they look,” he said.
Jesus Jiménez contributed reporting from Los Angeles.
Miriam Jordan reports from a grass roots perspective on immigrants and their impact on the demographics, society and economy of the United States.
Jazmine Ulloa is a national reporter covering immigration for The Times.
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