Judge Orders ICE Goons To Stop Racial Profiling And Start Following The Constitution

Reasonable suspicion requires more than being Hispanic at Home Depot.

Sua Sponte Photography / Shutterstock.com

The Supreme Court is perfectly willing to let the Trump administration break the law, but trial judges are not. And so on Friday yet another federal district court judge issued an injunction attempting to rein in ICE’s goon squads. In a case captioned Perdomo v. Noem, Judge Maami Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong of the Central District of California issued a temporary restraining order barring the the Department of Homeland Security from snatching up every non-white person they can get their hands on and locking them in a basement without access to food, water, medicine, or counsel.

Specifically, she ordered DHS to stop dispatching “roving patrols” of ICE agents to arrest people without cause and to give detainees access to their lawyers.

As Judge Frimpong noted, requiring the government to abide by the Constitution’s guarantees of process and access to counsel should be “fairly simple and non-controversial.” Nevertheless, the Trump administration already noticed its appeal to the Ninth Circuit (even though TROs are not immediately appealable).

LA Raiders

On the campaign trail, Donald Trump promised to be the deporter-in-chief. But in fact his deportations got off to a slow start, with fewer than 1,000 immigrants arrested a day for months. This infuriated Stephen Miller, the president’s xenophobia czar.

“Why aren’t you at Home Depot? Why aren’t you at 7-Eleven?” he screamed at ICE agents in May, according to the Washington Examiner. On May 28, Miller and DHS Secretary Kristi Noem tripled ICE’s quota to 3,000 daily arrests.

“Under President Trump’s leadership, we are looking to set a goal of a minimum of 3,000 arrests for ICE every day, and President Trump is going to keep pushing to get that number up higher each and every single day, so we can get all of the Biden illegals that were flooded into our country for four years out of our country,” Miller boasted to Sean Hannity.

A week later, Trump dispatched ICE to Los Angeles, promising “the largest Mass Deportation Operation in History.”

Since then, heavily-armed ICE agents and federal officers have conducted military-style raids on farms and farmers’ markets, car washes, bus stops, swap meets, churches, and public parks. The agents, typically decked out in body armor and wearing masks without any visible badges or insignia, don’t have arrest warrants, and routinely refuse to identify themselves.

ICE goons demand proof of citizenship from anyone who “looks Hispanic,” and they’ve even detained many citizens who failed to carry around their passports. Indeed, the entire premise of Stephen Miller’s “7-11” exhortation was that ICE agents should go where immigrants seek work and racially profile their way to meet the required body count.

But tripling arrests to meet an arbitrary quota doesn’t magically create the infrastructure to detain them in accordance with the Constitution. Immigrants are being held in a temporary processing facility in the basement of a federal building known as B-18. B-18 is not a detention facility: It has no beds, showers, or medical facilities. Detainees are packed into “small, windowless rooms” that are “so cramped that detainees cannot sit, let alone lie down, for hours at a time.” They’ve been denied food, fresh water, and medical supplies. That’s torture.

Worse, the administration has also denied detainees held at B-18 — many of whom are citizens and have broken no laws — the right to counsel. On at least one occasion, ICE closed the building to visitors and pepper-sprayed lawyers and family members who tried to get in to see detainees being held there. As Judge Frimpong described it, “On the rare occasions when attorneys and family members were allowed access to their clients or loved ones, they were made to wait hours at a time to see them, and the resulting visits were limited to a mere five to ten minutes.”

Since the raids began on June 6, 2025, over 1,500 people have been arrested in the Los Angeles metro area. Hundreds are currently being held in that basement.

The best defense is a good offense

None of this is remotely legal, and the government hasn’t even attempted to argue that it is. DOJ lawyers more or less conceded in open court that it’s unlawful to arrest people without cause based solely on their race and occupation and then deny them access to counsel. Instead, the government raised various procedural arguments, complaining that the plaintiffs waited over a month to file their complaint and “elected not to file a new case” but instead joined an existing habeas case.

It takes a particular kind of chutzpah to deny detainees meaningful access to a lawyer and then complain that they took too long to file their complaint.

Judge Frimpong was deeply unimpressed:

The Court finds that Plaintiffs acted expeditiously in this case. … Considering the totality of the circumstances-in particular, the alleged ongoing denial of access to counsel that continued at least until the filing of the instant TRO… the Court finds that Plaintiffs acted swiftly to file the first amended complaint and the instant TROs.

The administration also argued that the court lacks jurisdiction to hear plaintiffs’ claims because of 8 U.S.C. § 1252, which limits on how detainees may challenge final orders of removal issued by an immigration judge. But that argument flatly contradicts long-standing Supreme Court precedent as well as common sense. Since many of the plaintiffs in this case are US citizens who have been unlawfully arrested and detained, they don’t have immigration proceedings or orders of removal, final or otherwise. As Judge Frimpong concluded, it simply “cannot be” the case that citizens have no venue to raise constitutional claims “and none of the authority cited by Defendants says it is.”

The only other argument made by the government in its defense was to “attempt to minimize the impact” of the raids by “characteriz[ing] them as limited to a short period of time justified by nearby civil unrest.”

Knock that shit off

Judge Frimpong’s TRO has two components: First, it mandates that anyone warehoused at B-18 shall have meaningful access to counsel. The government must open B-18 for legal visitation “seven days per week, for a minimum of eight hours per day on business days (Monday through Friday), and a minimum of four hours per day on weekends and holidays.” Detainees must also be permitted “access to confidential telephone calls with attorneys, legal representatives, and legal assistants at no charge to the detainee,” and those calls “shall not be screened, recorded, or otherwise monitored.”

Second, the order requires ICE to quit arresting people for the “crime” of being Hispanic and standing outside a convenience store.

“As required by the Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution, Defendants are enjoined from conducting detentive stops in this District unless the agent or officer has reasonable suspicion that the person to be stopped is within the United States in violation of U.S. immigration law,” she wrote.

And reasonable suspicion cannot be some form of “he fit the profile.”

Defendants may not rely solely on the factors below, alone or in combination, to form reasonable suspicion for a detentive stop, except as permitted by law;

1. Apparent race or ethnicity;

2. Speaking Spanish or speaking English with an accent;

3. Presence at a particular location (e.g. bus stop, car wash, tow yard, day laborer pick up site, agricultural site, etc.); or

4. The type of work one does.

As a remedial measure, the judge also required ICE to document the grounds for stops occurring in the district and retrain officers to understand the difference between reasonable suspicion and racial profiling.

“The Court does not find prejudice to Defendants,” she concluded. “Complying with the law does not impose harm,” and “requiring law enforcement to comply with the Constitution does not prevent law enforcement from enforcing the law.”

Bragging about your crimes

The rightwing reaction to Judge Frimpong’s order has been predictably disingenuous. The most common take is to pretend that a ban on racial profiling is actually a ban on making arrests at 7-11 and Home Depot.

"This is the equivalent of a judge making the ruling that the DEA can't go search individuals for drugs and narcotics on Skid Row in LA,” babbled whichever central casting rando is sitting on the white couch at Fox and Friends this week. “It makes no sense. They are carrying out federal immigration law."

Except that the DEA can’t just go search individuals for drugs and narcotics on Skid Row in LA! Cops need reasonable suspicion to arrest and search people, and looking like a drug user in a place where people use drugs won’t cut it.

That same morning, America’s Nazi uncle Tom Homan beamed in to lawsplain to Judge Frimpong that ICE is 100 percent doing racial profiling.

Look, people need to understand, ICE officers and Border Patrol don’t need probable cause to walk up to somebody, briefly detain them, and question them. They just need totality of the circumstances, right? They just go through the observation, get our typical facts based on the location, the occupation, their physical appearance, their actions. A uniformed border patrol officer walks up to them at for instance a Home Depot and they got all these other articulable facts, plus the person walks away or runs away.

But Homan is not a lawyer, and so perhaps on Saturday one of the attorneys at DHS sat him down and explained that he’d just admitted that ICE agents routinely violate the Constitution. By Sunday he was back on air with CNN’s Dana Bash explaining that adding up a bunch of illegal factors magically makes it legal to racially profile someone:

As I said in that interview, it's articulable facts, with an S. So appearance can be just one. For instance, if someone has an MS-13 tattoo on their face, that may be one factor to add to other factors to raise reasonable suspicion.

I want to be clear about that again, because my words were taken out of context. Physical description cannot be the sole reason to detain and question somebody. That can't be the sole reason to raise reasonable suspicion. It's a myriad of factors. And I could sit here for the next half-hour and give you all the factors.

So weird that they send this guy on TV but never to court!

This argument will likely go nowhere with the Ninth Circuit. But the Supreme Court appears willing to burn down generations-worth of civil rights law to avoid saying “no” to Trump. So … ¯\_(ツ)_/¯