Pedro Vasquez Perdomo v. Kristi Noem Ruling: a Double Standard on Race to Handicap ICE
ICE had disputed the advocates characterization of its stops. Its officers have more particularized suspicion based on their experience and on additional observed facts about the setting and the suspect, ICE argued. Frimpong s rushed briefing and hearing schedule had not provided the government sufficient time to make its defense, the Justice Department attorneys alleged, to no effect.
Frimpong issued a temporary restraining order (TRO) blocking ICE from using the four factors of race, language, location, and job type in deciding whom to detain for questioning, unless agents have additional grounds for suspicion. The TRO covers the counties of Los Angeles, Riverside, San Bernardino, Orange, Ventura, Santa Barbara, and San Luis Obispo a huge area containing an estimated 1.5 million illegal aliens. Though Frimpong held that the four banned factors may in theory be used in tandem with other factors, her order in essence shuts down ICE s ability to question suspects in her district.
The four factors describe the core situation of many illegal alien workplaces. That is not an artifact of the Trump administration s allegedly biased views; those factors are objective features of the illegal alien subculture, which is now, as a practical matter, virtually off limits to government investigation. The opinion invites a constitutional challenge to any attempted deportation of an illegal alien who fits the profile of a Hispanic Spanish-speaker working at a location known to rely on illegal labor.
On August 1, a panel from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit upheld Frimpong s decision. The panel coyly noted that if ICE is not, as it claims, conducting unconstitutional stops, it should not object to being enjoined from conducting unconstitutional stops a silly simplification of how litigation and judicial power operate that would apply to every injunction.
Immigrant advocates greeted Frimpong s order ecstatically, immediately grasping its implications for immigration enforcement. Mark Rosenbaum, for decades a lawyer with the ACLU of Southern California and now with Public Counsel, a public interest firm, called it the most important decision in the history of the country about limitations on what immigration authorities can do when they carry out operations.
President Donald Trump s Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, by contrast, called the ruling another act of insurrection against the United States and its sovereign people.
Heather MacDonald.
Welp I guess we get to see what the Supremes will do. If they uphold this injunction, that will put an end to most practical efforts to deport illegal aliens. But I don’t believe they’ll do that.