Supreme Court Lifts Restrictions on L.A. Immigration Stops

A federal judge had ordered agents not to make indiscriminate stops relying on factors like a person’s ethnicity or that they speak Spanish.

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.

“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,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

“Rather than stand idly by while our constitutional freedoms are lost,” Justice Sotomayor added, “I dissent.”

The court’s ruling for now 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 majority’s failure to provide an explanation for the ruling means that it is hard to say whether its reasoning applies nationwide or is limited to the Los Angeles area, where the administration has said that the problems flowing from illegal immigration are especially pronounced. But there is little doubt that the ruling will have the practical effect of further emboldening the administration’s uncompromising efforts to deport unauthorized immigrants around the country.

Mayor Karen Bass of Los Angeles said she expected the ruling to have sweeping consequences.

“I want the entire nation to hear me when I say this isn’t just an attack on the people of Los Angeles, this is an attack on every person in every city in this country,” she said in a statement.

Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, said in a statement that the ruling was “a win for the safety of Californians and the rule of law,” adding that “D.H.S. law enforcement will not be slowed down and will continue to arrest and remove the murderers, rapists, gang members and other criminal illegal aliens that Karen Bass continues to give safe harbor.”

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. They described the encounters 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.

In response to the suit, Judge Maame E. Frimpong, of the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, placed significant restrictions on President Trump’s efforts to ramp up immigrant arrests to achieve his pledge of mass deportations.

Judge Frimpong 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.

In a lengthy concurring opinion, Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, the only member of the majority who offered an explanation for the court’s ruling, said demographic realities justified the actions of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.

“About 10 percent of the people in the Los Angeles region are illegally in the United States — meaning about two million illegal immigrants out of a total population of 20 million,” he wrote.

Justice Kavanaugh said the four factors identified by Judge Frimpong can play a role in determining whom to stop. For instance, he wrote, unauthorized immigrants often work as day laborers in landscaping, agriculture or construction and “many of those illegally in the Los Angeles area come from Mexico or Central America and do not speak much English.”

Apparent ethnicity by itself is not a permissible reason to stop someone, he added, but it can be a relevant consideration in combination with other factors.

In dissent, Justice Sotomayor wrote that the administration and Justice Kavanaugh had “all but declared that all Latinos, U.S. citizens or not, who work low wage jobs are fair game to be seized at any time, taken away from work and held until they provide proof of their legal status to the agents’ satisfaction.”

Justice Sotomayor was also critical of Justice Kavanaugh’s defense of what he said were agents’ “brief stops for questioning.”

“Countless people in the Los Angeles area have been grabbed, thrown to the ground and handcuffed simply because of their looks, their accents and the fact they make a living by doing manual labor,” she wrote. “Today, the court needlessly subjects countless more to these exact same indignities.”

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 his concurring opinion, Justice Kavanaugh wrote that if agents use excessive force, victims may be able to sue.

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.

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.”

Mohammad Tajsar, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union, said the Supreme Court’s ruling was a disappointment.

“Although this decision is a devastating setback for our plaintiffs and communities who, for months, have been subjected to immoral immigration stops, we will continue fighting the administration’s racist deportation scheme,” he said.

The Supreme Court’s order, Justice Sotomayor wrote, was “troubling for another reason: it is entirely unexplained.”

That has been commonplace in many of the roughly 20 rulings on emergency applications filed by the Trump administration.

“In the last eight months,” Justice Sotomayor wrote, “this court’s appetite to circumvent the ordinary appellate process and weigh in on important issues has grown exponentially. Its interest in explaining itself, unfortunately, has not.”

Miriam Jordan and Shawn Hubler contributed reporting.

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