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A California judge has confirmed what any reasonable person has known for weeks now: the immigration raids being carried out by Donald Trump’s masked agents are unconstitutional. In a functioning democracy, society can simply not abide by what are effectively secret police running around and detaining and arresting undocumented immigrants and U.S. citizens alike.
The judge, a Biden appointee named Maame Ewusi-Mensaah Frimpong, which the right is up in arms about, noted the obvious: what has been happening in Los Angeles and elsewhere is a clear violation of Americans’ rights against improper search and seizure. Frimpong found that there was no “official” policy when it came to these “roving patrols.” In other words, in a legal sense this is all exactly what it has looked like all along: an unconstitutional, race-based operation by a paramilitary organization that has acted with impunity for the better part of two months now.
The U.S. government, through its immigration agents on the streets, has effectively been engaged in widespread racial profiling.
The 52-page ruling came down on Friday night and requires the government to stop conducting these raids as they’re currently being carried out. That means that agents have to have an actual reason for stopping someone — other than that they look Mexican, speak Spanish or with a Spanish accent, or are sitting in a certain location — for immigration enforcement operations. Frimpong’s temporary injunctive order (TRO) also requires the government to provide detainees being held in poor conditions in the basement of the federal building in downtown LA better access to attorneys.
Frimpong granted the TRO based on a “fairly modest request” made by immigrant advocacy and workers’ rights organizations that filed a lawsuit against the government that Trump’s masked agents simply stop conducting an unconstitutional, racially discriminatory reign of terror.
Some key findings from the ruling:
One man, a U.S, citizen, was improperly detained and had an immigration agent point a taser at his head — another instance of this troubling tactic, which I touched on in late June, which is not an approved use of force for any law enforcement agency I’ve ever reported on
Immigration agents took a U.S. citizen’s ID and did not return it
The government used protests and what they called “riots” as a pretext to deny detainees access to their attorneys, going so far to say that “if ‘riots’ resumed” and a TRO preventing the government from arbitrarily detaining whomever they liked was issued, immigration agencies at the federal building “would not be able to protect their employees and the detainees” there. Frimpong shot down this argument, saying that “granting access to counsel is not the same as granting unrestricted access to the public,” nor was “permitting confidential” phone calls between attorneys and detainees the same as letting protesters in the front door of the federal building.
The government had a week to present evidence to the court that it was basing its arrests and detention of people on something other than that they believed undocumented immigrants were present at certain locations ,but failed to do so.
The government also couldn’t explain why immigrants and citizens who ran away frightened by Trump’s secret police represented “reasonable suspicion.” “Defendants do not explain why fleeing upon seeing unidentified masked men with guns exiting from tinted cars without license plates raises suspicion,” Frimpong wrote.
The government also couldn’t explain how it was identifying possible undocumented immigrants to stop based on any factors other than where they were and what they looked like. “Defendants do not explain why being at a bus stop in Pasadena raises suspicion that [targets] may be undocumented immigrants.”
The government argued that it would have to retrain its agents if the TRO were issued — meaning that the agents are currently either not educated on the basics of constitutional rights against improper search and seizure. Or, what is obviously more likely the case, agents on the streets of LA and elsewhere simply do not care about these rights as they strive to reach immigrant arrest quotas that have been handed down from the White House.
Towards the end of Frimpong’s order, the judge says something that should also be very obvious to Americans of any political persuasion with a love and appreciation for personal liberty: “Requiring law enforcement to comply with the Constitution does not prevent law enforcement from enforcing the law.”
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Whether the Trump administration, DHS and its immigration agents on the ground will actually comply with Frimpong’s order is an open question. I’m guessing there’s a Trump rampage coming on this TRO pretty soon, probably to be accompanied by a screed from White House Press Secretary Caroline Leavitt on Monday decrying the order as a move by a “liberal activist” judge preventing immigration agents from doing their jobs. By Saturday afternoon, reliable Trump sycophant Rep. Andy Biggs had already begun the proselytizing on behalf of the administration’s unconstitutional behavior:
Defiance of the order could — and in my mind, should — bring about a troubling but necessary scenario in which local law enforcement in Los Angeles and elsewhere begins to stop Trump’s masked immigration agents from violating the constitutional rights of citizens and immigrants under the purported protection and jurisdiction of agencies like the Los Angeles Police Department.
This scenario is the stuff of autocratic regimes: provincial law enforcement in direct conflict with other law enforcement or military is something typically reserved for failing or failed states. But in the interest of trying to stop the United States from becoming the latter, that difficult choice between allowing the federal government to continue violating the rights of citizens and utilizing local law enforcement to enforce the law may become necessary.
If Trump’s immigration agents ignore Frimpong’s order, I think it’s time for local law enforcement to step up and uphold their oaths to the constitution — because the Trump administration, DHS, ICE and agents on the ground clearly will not.
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