The Trump administration recently told the Supreme Court that a California judge’s order put law enforcement in a “straitjacket.” But plaintiffs who won that lower court order have urged the high court to keep it in place, arguing that lifting it would bless an “immigration dragnet” ensnaring millions of people in the Los Angeles area — including U.S. citizens — based on how they look and speak, and where they work and congregate.
U.S. District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong issued the temporary restraining order against the government on July 11. The Biden appointee said the individuals and groups that sued, which include U.S. citizens, would likely succeed in proving that the government is “conducting roving patrols without reasonable suspicion and denying access to lawyers.” For now, she said, the government can’t rely solely on any combination of the following four factors to make stops: apparent race or ethnicity; speaking Spanish or accented English; presence at a particular location, like a day laborer pickup area; or one’s type of work.
After a federal appeals court panel declined to intervene on the administration’s behalf, U.S. Solicitor General John Sauer turned to the Supreme Court for help in lifting the order, which he said “defies blackletter Fourth Amendment law, imposing a straitjacket on law-enforcement efforts that is inimical to the context- and case-specific totality-of-the-circumstances inquiry that this Court’s precedents demand.”
Opposing emergency high court relief, the plaintiffs countered that the judge’s order “broke no new legal ground,” and that it “does not prevent the government from enforcing the immigration laws, conducting consensual encounters, or relying on any or all of the four factors along with other facts to form reasonable suspicion.” They further wrote that the administration’s “extraordinary claim that it can get very close to justifying a seizure of any Latino person in the Central District [of California] because of the asserted number of Latino people there who are not legally present is anathema to the Constitution.”
The administration can file a final reply brief the justices, after which we will learn whether this will be the latest instance of the high court saving the administration from a lower court loss in President Donald Trump’s second term. Subscribe to the Deadline: Legal Newsletter for expert analysis on the top legal stories of the week, including updates from the Supreme Court and developments in the Trump administration’s legal cases.
Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro," a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined MS NOW, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.
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