A federal appeals court panel Friday evening denied the Trump administration’s bid for a stay of a temporary restraining order halting the federal government’s roving immigration patrols.
“If, as Defendants suggest, they are not conducting stops that lack reasonable suspicion, they can hardly claim to be irreparably harmed by an injunction aimed at preventing a subset of stops not supported by reasonable suspicion ,” the panel wrote.
All three judges on the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel were appointed by Democratic presidents.
An eventual appeal to the Supreme Court is expected, where six of the nine justices were appointed by Republican presidents.
“This is a victory for Los Angeles, and this is a victory because the people of Los Angeles stood together,” Mayor Karen Bass told reporters Friday night outside Getty House, her official residence.
“I think the administration might have believed that this was going to divide our city, that our city was going to go at each other in division, but we did not. We stood strong, and I am very happy to say that us standing strong … gave the court the resolve to uphold this decision.”
The opinion from Judges Marsha S. Berzon, Jennifer Sung and Ronald M. Gould declared, “There is no predicate action that the individual plaintiffs would need to take, other than simply going about their lives, to potentially be subject to the challenged stops.”
A 90-minute hearing was held Monday in San Francisco. as the administration sought to overturn U.S. District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong ruling that the roving immigration patrols were illegally conducted without reasonable suspicion.
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 the Department of Homeland Security has unconstitutionally arrested and detained people in order to meet arbitrary arrest quotas set by the Trump administration.
Frimpong has scheduled a hearing in the case on Sept. 24.