The American Civil Liberties Union filed suit Tuesday in Los Angeles to compel the Department of Homeland Security to produce information on immigration enforcement practices within the United States.
The federal lawsuit seeks records on so-called “roving patrols” in areas of San Diego and El Centro far from the border with Mexico.
Department officials could not immediately be reached for comment.
The plaintiffs contend that DHS officers have questioned farm workers and residents in Fallbrook, about 70 miles north of Mexico, and Laguna Beach, nearly 90 miles north.
“Many Americans are unaware that the Border Patrol operates so-called ‘roving patrols’ far away from the border itself, deep into the interior of the United States,” said Mitra Ebadolahi, Border Litigation Project staff attorney with the ACLU Foundation of San Diego.
“In the course of these operations, federal agents routinely disregard the legal limitations on their authority and violate the civil rights of California residents and visitors,” Ebadolahi said. “Yet DHS refuses to hold agents accountable and ignores basic requests for information about these abusive practices.”
The ACLU and UC Irvine School of Law Immigrant Rights Clinic said they submitted a Freedom of Information Act request July 3, 2014, to both DHS and CBP, seeking records related to the Southern California operations, but the agencies have not responded. A similar lawsuit was previously filed seeking information on stops in Arizona.
The ACLU contends that records obtained in upstate New York revealed that the “vast majority” of stops did not target recent border-crossers and occurred far from the border. Only 1 percent resulted in the initiation of removal proceedings and many relied on race as the basis of questioning and arrests, according to the ACLU.
The agencies don’t compile adequate data on stops that would allow them to detect, deter, and respond to rights abuses, even though such data collection is an accepted law enforcement practice used by other federal agencies, including the FBI, according to the ACLU. The plaintiffs also accused the agencies of “regularly” ignoring Freedom of Information Act requests and refusing to make public basic information that has been collected.
— City News Service