LOS ANGELES (CNS) – An appellate hearing is scheduled Monday in the Trump administration’s bid for a stay pending appeal of a temporary restraining order halting the federal government’s aggressive, month-long immigration sweeps across Southern California.
In granting the order earlier this month, a Los Angeles federal judge found that the roving immigration patrols were conducted without reasonable suspicion, and that the government was denying detainees access to counsel.
Attorneys for the administration of President Donald Trump are expected to argue before the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco that the immigration raids are carefully targeted, not random, and conducted with probable cause to make arrests.
The appeal before a panel of three judges — all nominated by Democratic presidents — will be streamed live Monday at 1 p.m. on the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals website and on YouTube.
A coalition of civil rights, immigrant rights and local government agencies sought the TRO, arguing the raids have violated constitutional protections against unreasonable searches and seizures by conducting warrantless stops on people who simply appear to be Latino, and due process rights to access to counsel in immigration detention, where they say detainees are facing “dungeon-like conditions.”
The order granted July 14 by U.S. District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong “is inflicting irreparable harm by preventing the Executive from ensuring that immigration laws are enforced,” U.S. Department of Justice lawyers wrote in a motion asking for an emergency stay. “These harms will be compounded the longer that injunction is in place.”
The appeal stems from a lawsuit filed July 2 by Southland residents, workers and advocacy groups alleging the U.S. Department of Homeland Security is operating a program of “abducting and disappearing” community members using unlawful arrest tactics, then confining detainees in illegal conditions while denying access to attorneys.
The proposed class-action suit brought in Los Angeles federal court by five workers as well as three membership organizations and a legal services provider alleges that DHS has unconstitutionally arrested and detained people in order to meet arbitrary arrest quotas set by the Trump administration.
“Since June 6th, marauding, masked goons have descended upon Los Angeles, terrorizing our brown communities and tearing up the Constitution in the process,” Mohammad Tajsar, senior staff attorney with plaintiffs’ representative, the ACLU Foundation of Southern California, said in a statement previously. “No matter their status or the color of their skin, everyone is guaranteed Constitutional rights to protect them from illegal stops. We will hold DHS accountable.”
Plaintiffs — including the Los Angeles Worker Center Network, United Farm Workers, the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, and Immigrant Defenders Law Center — seek to represent two classes of individuals, those who have been or will be subjected to unlawful practices of suspicionless stops and warrantless arrests without evaluations of flight risk, according to the complaint.
In response, DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin issued a statement saying claims that people are being targeted because of their skin color are “disgusting and categorically false.” She also insisted all immigration enforcement operations are “highly targeted,” not random.
Armando Gudino, executive director of the LA Center Network, countered that the raids “targeted the most vulnerable members of our workforce, essential workers who are the backbone of our local economy. We cannot allow racial profiling, warrantless arrests, and denial of due process to become the standard operating procedure in our communities.”
Mark Rosenbaum, senior special counsel for strategic litigation at Public Counsel, which is also representing the plaintiffs, alleges that members of the Southern California community have been “whisked away and disappeared into a grossly overcrowded dungeon-like facility lacking food, medical care, basic hygiene, and beds.”
Rosenbaum contends that DHS is operating a “draconian crackdown” to “eviscerate basic rights to due process and to shield from public view the horrifying ways ICE and Border Patrol agents treat citizens and residents who have been stigmatized by our government as violent criminals based on skin color alone.”
He added, “This lawsuit is in part about putting an end to that big lie.”
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