A federal judge issued a tentative ruling on Thursday that suggests that he will order the Trump administration to stop the illegal stops and arrests that say that defenders have terrified Angelenos, forced some immigrants to hide and damage the local economy.
The ruling was not made public, but a final order is expected on Friday on the case that has become a central piece in the battle for Trump's mass deportation plan. The lawsuit filed by immigrant rights groups last week seeks to prevent federal agents from stopping and arresting brown skin without probable cause and then placing them in conditions “similar to dungeons” without access to lawyers.
Before a hearing of hours in the United States District Court for the Central Judge of California, Maame Ewusi-Menah Frimpong, provided lawyers with a long ruling based on previous judicial presentations in the case. The tentative decisions are not uncommon and Frimpong said things could change according to the arguments he heard from the lawyers on Thursday afternoon.
The ACLU, the public advisor, other groups and private lawyers filed the lawsuit on behalf of several immigrant rights groups, three immigrants collected in a bus stop and two US citizens, one that was held despite showing agents their identification.
Throughout the audience, Frimpong seemed to disagree with the lawyer of the government Skedzielewski and his specific lack of evidence to refute the accusations of indiscriminate orientation.
He pressed Skedzielewski on how the agents were arresting, after arguing that “these are sophisticated operations” and seemed to say that the arrests arose from individuals who were being attacked.
In other cases in which the Local and Federal Police is pointing to people for crimes, said the judge, there are reports after an arrest “about why they arrested this person, how they were where they were and what they did.”
“There does not seem like that, which makes it difficult for the court to accept its description of what is happening, because there is no evidence that this is what is happening instead of what the plaintiffs are saying is happening,” said Frimpong.
Skedzielewski argued that the lack of evidence is why the court should not grant a requested temporal restriction order. The Government argued that it only had “a couple of days” to try to identify the people mentioned in judicial documents.
“We have simply not had the opportunity to identify in many cases who stopped, much less, much less for a holiday weekend, of the agents,” he said.
Frimpong didn't seem moved. The designated President Biden questioned the government's agency of two high -ranking officials who have played a key role in the raids in southern California, Kyle Harvick, an agent of the border patrol in charge of El Centro and Andre Quinones, deputy director of the field office for immigration control and customs.
His statements, he said, were “very general” and “they really did not get involved with the quite high volume of evidence that the plaintiffs have put in the record of the things we have all seen and heard in the news.”
“If there is any of these people and there was a report on 'This is how we identified this patio of towing, parking, etc.' That would have been useful, “said Frimpong. “It's hard for court to believe that in the time you had, you couldn't have done that.”
Skedzielewski said that the evidence is full of instances of stops, but “it is not full of any evidence that those stop or that the agents in any way did not follow the law.”
He said the agents' actions were “above the board.”
This week, the city and the Los Angeles County, along with Pasadena, Montebello, Monterey Park, Santa Monica, Culver City, Pico Rivera, West Hollywood, sought to join the demand.
In their judicial presentation, the cities and the county counteracted the raids have not tried the application of immigration, but are politically promoted “to set an example” of the region to “implement policies that President Donald J. Trump dislikes him.”
They cited Trump's position on their social media platform, where immigration officials ask “everything in their possession” to achieve “the largest mass deportation program in history” by expanding efforts to stop and deport people in Los Angeles and other cities that are “the core of Democratic power.”
The lawyers of the United States Department of Justice argued that the arrests were legal, and any court order could not be applied widely.
“The Government has a legitimate and significant interest in ensuring that immigration laws are applied, and any limitation would severely violate the authority of article II of the President,” government lawyers wrote.
Since the operation began on June 6, immigration agents have arrested almost 2,700 undocumented people according to the data published by the DHS on Tuesday. Generalized arrests have paralyzed parts of the city where a large number of immigrants work, such as the District of Flores in the center. The cities argued that the “illegal raids” are preventing them from performing critical functions of the application of the law, since they “divert the limited resources to determine if the armed persons who leave unmarked vehicles are masked federal agents and unidentified federal agents, or masked and masked criminals.
