Judge bars ICE racial profiling in SoCal

Immigration agents in Southern California can no longer stop people simply because they look Latino and work-class. U.S. District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong issued a preliminary injunction on Wednesday that mandates agents establish individualized reasonable suspicion before detaining anyone for immigration enforcement. The ruling covers the Central District of California, which includes Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, Ventura, Santa Barbara, and San Luis Obispo counties.

The legal battle began last year when the ACLU of Southern California, Public Counsel, and private attorneys filed a lawsuit during a statewide immigration crackdown. They sought to end unlawful stops and protect due process rights. The Supreme Court initially stayed the judge's earlier order based on race or ethnicity. However, the government only recently turned over discovery, providing new material that changed the court's view of the operations.

Plaintiffs argued that new evidence proves race is the main driver of stops. They cited body camera footage from a June 2025 raid at a Home Depot in Hollywood. In that video, an agent identified a man in a minivan as likely undocumented. Another agent texted about seeing 'tonks everywhere selling food.' The lawsuit notes that 'tonk' is a term derived from the sound an agent's flashlight makes when hitting a person's head.

Frimpong found that the government maintained an officially sanctioned policy of racial profiling. She cited a mountain of evidence, including text messages where agents used slurs. The judge stated that training agents to follow the law does not negate the practice of ignoring it. The order notes that Latino U.S. citizens had their attempts to prove citizenship rejected, such as a car wash worker whose agent refused to let him retrieve his passport.

The Trump administration filed a notice of appeal Wednesday, seeking review by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for comment. During a September hearing, Daniel Mummolo from the Department of Justice argued the record was the same as what the Supreme Court saw. Frimpong disagreed, noting that the Supreme Court did not explain its reasons for the prior stay and that Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh's concurrence was not binding precedent.

Mohammad Tajsar, director of immigrants' rights at the ACLU Foundation of Southern California, said the order recognizes that agents were racially profiling. He described the practice as targeting Latino community members in violation of the Constitution. Tajsar added that the plaintiffs will monitor the government's compliance with the new rules. The order exempts stops at ports of entry and checkpoints but applies to roving patrols in public areas.

The discovery revealed that agents often conducted random stops rather than targeted ones. An email from ICE headquarters in late May 2025 instructed field offices to arrest nontargets in mass. A veteran ICE agent testified that the operations were not designed in good faith to arrest identified targets. Instead, teams would run checks at locations like car washes until they identified a small number of possibly unlawfully present individuals before choosing a day to raid.

The judge also addressed civil arrests without a warrant. Agents must now determine that a person is likely to escape before making such an arrest. Previously, agents detained Latino workers and customers while leaving white people nearby alone. The new evidence showed apparent frustration among some officers who feared they were being asked to break the law. The government had touted the Kavanaugh opinion as vindicating agency practices, but the new injunction stands for now in the district.