A federal appeals court panel heard arguments Monday but made no immediate ruling in the Trump administration’s bid for a stay of a temporary restraining order halting the federal government’s aggressive, month-long immigration dragnet across Southern California.
The three-judge panel, however, questioned the legality of the government’s actions and the origins of a reported White House directive requiring immigration agents across the country to make 3,000 arrests of undocumented immigrants per day.
The discussion came during a 90-minute hearing before a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco. Federal attorneys want the panel to issue a stay of a Los Angeles federal judge’s earlier ruling that roving immigration patrols were illegally conducted without reasonable suspicion.
U.S. Department of Justice Attorney Jacob Roth argued that the lower court judge, U.S. District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong, was incorrect in her findings, and insisted that the immigration stops — which were largely halted in the Los Angeles area by the judge’s order on July 14 — were perfectly legal, carefully targeted and conducted with probable cause to make arrests.
“The officers are instructed to find reasonable suspicion before an arrest,” Roth told the appeals panel, adding that Frimpong’s restraining order “is fundamentally flawed on multiple levels.”
However, the panel, all Democratic appointees, appeared skeptical.
Judge Ronald Gould, an appointee of former President Bill Clinton, asked Roth three separate times to explain the 3,000-person daily arrests strategy and to pinpoint exactly where the quota supposedly originated.
Questioned if there was actually such a policy, Roth responded, “Not to my knowledge, your honor,” adding, “I think it came from a newspaper article.”
Gould ordered Roth to determine the origin of the apparent directive and file the results with the court. White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller reportedly issued the directive to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in May, a month before ICE launched its aggressive campaign against what it insists are unauthorized immigrants in the Los Angeles region.
“It appears they are randomly selecting Home Depots where people are standing looking for jobs,” Judge Marsha Berzon, also a Clinton appointee, remarked at Monday’s hearing, which was streamed live on the 9th Circuit website.
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.
“There is a non-trivial number of people who are saying this is happening,” Berzon said.
In his response to the government’s bid to reverse the TRO, Mohammad Tajsar, a staff attorney at the ACLU of Southern California, argued that the administration was “making stops and arrests without a case-by-case analysis” and without probable cause, in many instances.
The government has directed immigration agents “with a wink and a nod … to go out there and snatch” people up, Tajsar alleged.
The judges did not indicate when they might render a decision, but Gould said it would be “as early as we can.”
Frimpong has scheduled a hearing in the case on Sept. 24.
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