Saturday, August 2, 2025

Appeals Court Ruling Friday Upholds Temporary Restrictions on SoCal Immigration Arrests

CITY NEWS SERVICE WITH PASADENA NOW

A federal appeals court on Friday upheld an order temporarily blocking U.S. immigration authorities from conducting arrests in the Los Angeles area without establishing probable cause.

The ruling keeps a temporary restraining order in effect while the broader legal challenge continues.

The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of a lower court’s decision, which found that federal enforcement actions likely targeted individuals based on race and other indicators, such as speaking Spanish or seeking work at home building centers.

“If, as Defendants suggest, they are not conducting stops that lack reasonable suspicion, they can hardly claim to be irreparably harmed by an injunction aimed at preventing a subset of stops not supported by reasonable suspicion ,” the panel wrote.

The temporary restraining order prohibits immigration agents from stopping individuals without reasonable suspicion and from relying solely on four factors: (1) apparent race or ethnicity; (2) speaking Spanish or English with an accent; (3) presence in a particular location such as a bus stop, car wash, tow yard, day laborer pickup site, or agricultural site; and (4) the type of work the person does.

The order does not stop warranted stops, detentions and arrests conducted under legally permissible conditions.

All three judges on the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel were appointed by Democratic presidents.

An eventual appeal to the Supreme Court is expected, where six of the nine justices were appointed by Republican presidents.

“This is a victory for Los Angeles, and this is a victory because the people of Los Angeles stood together,” Mayor Karen Bass told reporters Friday night outside Getty House, her official residence.

“I think the administration might have believed that this was going to divide our city, that our city was going to go at each other in division, but we did not. We stood strong, and I am very happy to say that us standing strong … gave the court the resolve to uphold this decision.”

The opinion from Judges Marsha S. Berzon, Jennifer Sung and Ronald M. Gould declared, “There is no predicate action that the individual plaintiffs would need to take, other than simply going about their lives, to potentially be subject to the challenged stops.”

A 90-minute hearing was held Monday in San Francisco. as the administration sought to overturn U.S. District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong ruling that the roving immigration patrols were illegally conducted without reasonable suspicion.

The appeal stems from a lawsuit filed July 2 by Southland residents, workers and advocacy groups alleging the U.S. Department of Homeland Security is operating a program of “abducting and disappearing” community members using unlawful arrest tactics, then confining detainees in illegal conditions while denying access to attorneys.

The proposed class-action suit brought in Los Angeles federal court by five workers as well as three membership organizations and a legal services provider alleges that the Department of Homeland Security has unconstitutionally arrested and detained people in order to meet arbitrary arrest quotas set by the Trump administration.

Frimpong has scheduled a hearing in the case on Sept. 24.