The Supreme Court on Monday lifted a federal judge’s order prohibiting government agents from making indiscriminate immigration-related stops in the Los Angeles area that challengers called “blatant racial profiling.”
The court’s brief order was unsigned and gave no reasons. It is not the last word in the case, which is pending before a federal appeals court and may again reach the justices.
The court’s three liberal members dissented.
In the near term it allows what critics say are roving patrols of masked agents routinely violating the Fourth Amendment and what supporters say is a vigorous but lawful effort to enforce the nation’s immigration laws.
The lower courts had placed significant restrictions on President Trump’s efforts to ramp up immigrant arrests to achieve his pledge of mass deportations. Aggressive enforcement operations in Los Angeles — including encounters captured on video that appeared to be roundups of random Hispanic people by armed agents — have become a flashpoint, setting off protests and clashes in the area.
Civil rights groups and several individuals filed suit, accusing the administration of unconstitutional sweeps in which thousands of people had been arrested in what they described in the suit as “indiscriminate immigration operations” that had swept up thousands of day laborers, carwash workers, farmworkers, caregivers and others.
“Individuals with brown skin are approached or pulled aside by unidentified federal agents, suddenly and with a show of force,” the complaint said, “and made to answer questions about who they are and where they are from,” violating the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition of unreasonable searches and seizures.
One plaintiff, Jason Brian Gavidia, a U.S. citizen born in East Los Angeles, was stopped by a masked agent while he was working on his car outside a tow yard. The encounter was captured on video.
The agent asked whether Mr. Gavidia was American, and he said he was.
The agent then asked what hospital Mr. Gavidia had been born in, and he said he did not know. According to the lawsuit, the agent and a colleague proceeded to slam Mr. Gavidia against a metal gate, twist his arm and seize his phone.
“Fearing for his life, Gavidia offered to show the agents his ID,” the lawsuit said. “The agents took the ID, and about 20 minutes later, returned Gavidia’s phone and set him free. They never returned his ID.”
In response to what she called a “mountain of evidence” of agents “indiscriminately rounding up numerous individuals without reasonable suspicion,” Judge Maame E. Frimpong, of the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, ordered agents not to rely on several factors, alone or in combination, in deciding whom to stop and question in her judicial district, which includes Los Angeles and surrounding areas.
The factors were race or ethnicity; speaking Spanish or accented English; presence at a particular location, such as a day-laborer or agricultural site; or performing a particular type of work.
A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit refused to pause the order issued by Judge Frimpong, who was appointed by President Joseph R. Biden Jr.
The administration then appealed to the Supreme Court. In an emergency application, D. John Sauer, the solicitor general, wrote that Judge Frimpong’s order had unlawfully hamstrung immigration enforcement in the nation’s most populous judicial district, one he said “harbors some two million illegal aliens out of its total population of nearly 20 million people, making it by far the largest destination for illegal aliens.”
Mr. Sauer added that federal agents used judgment and discretion.
“Needless to say,” Mr. Sauer wrote, “no one thinks that speaking Spanish or working in construction always creates reasonable suspicion. Nor does anyone suggest those are the only factors federal agents ever consider. But in many situations, such factors — alone or in combination — can heighten the likelihood that someone is unlawfully present in the United States, above and beyond the 1-in-10 base line odds in the district.”
The challengers drew a different conclusion from the area’s demographics, one they said “explains the damning record in this case.” The odds, they wrote, suggest that “the government’s roving patrols have routinely stopped U.S. citizens — including some plaintiffs — without an individualized assessment of reasonable suspicion.”
Adam Liptak covers the Supreme Court and writes Sidebar, a column on legal developments. A graduate of Yale Law School, he practiced law for 14 years before joining The Times in 2002.
The post Supreme Court Lifts Restrictions on L.A. Immigration Stops appeared first on New York Times.
