Federal judge says Border Patrol California sweeps violated court order

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A federal judge in California ruled that Border Patrol agents continued making unlawful stops and arrests after the judge ordered them to stop, according to a decision unsealed Thursday. In the ruling, Judge Jennifer Thurston of the Eastern District of California said agents had “again detained people without reasonable suspicion,” relying on broad assumptions about day laborers instead of specific evidence that supported immigration enforcement.

Thurston granted a motion by the United Farm Workers seeking to enforce a preliminary injunction she issued last year. The injunction barred Border Patrol agents from detaining people in California’s Central Valley unless they documented the specific facts and reasoning for each stop, including whether arrests followed required assessments such as whether someone posed a flight risk.

At the center of the enforcement fight was a July operation in Sacramento in which agents swarmed the parking lot of a Home Depot and detained a group of day laborers, according to court records described in the decision. Thurston said that after the Sacramento sweep, some agents detained people, demanded to see their “papers,” and questioned them about immigration status “all without any legal basis for doing so.”

The judge also tied the Sacramento case to the earlier order that stemmed from similar raids in Kern County. Thurston, who is based in Fresno, said the Sacramento sweep violated her injunction from last year, and she also described her prior ruling as prohibiting warrantless arrests without first assessing whether a person is a flight risk.

The decision addressed how Border Patrol documented its operations. It said Border Patrol submitted nearly identical reports for multiple arrests, that some agents’ names were redacted from government paperwork, and that some records contained inaccuracies or could not be matched to specific individuals, including instances where it was unclear who authored reports. In one example described in the decision, an agent wrote that an arrest followed “a short foot pursuit,” and Thurston said the walking distance from the Home Depot to the arrest location was a twelve-minute walk while the documentation was “inaccurate and underinclusive.”

Thurston also said the government’s records failed to meet the requirements she set in the injunction about documenting specific facts and reasoning for each stop and arrest. She did not grant the UFW’s request to compel Border Patrol agents to receive additional training, but she said she expected agents in the field to immediately comply with the court’s order.

The ruling notes that another line of cases involving stops that do not rely on reasonable suspicion — referred to as “Kavanaugh stops” after a Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh opinion last year — faced its own challenge reaching the Supreme Court. In that case, the Supreme Court in September ruled it could pause a temporary restraining order in Los Angeles involving similar detentive stops without cause, but Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong wrote that the Supreme Court had not blessed those types of stops as lawful.

As field operations continued to draw scrutiny, UFW vice president Elizabeth Strater said in a statement that the decision reflected what the union had argued from the outset. “The ruling upholds what we’ve been saying all along: you can’t just stop people for being brown and working class,” Strater said.

Kevin Johnson, a UC Davis law professor whose work focuses on immigration and civil rights, described the decision as part of a process. He said the judge was exercising “judicial constraint” by giving the Trump administration an opportunity to comply with the prior order, adding that the consequences could escalate later, including possible fines, penalties, and criminal contempt if violations continued. Johnson pointed to a past case in which former Maricopa County, Arizona, Sheriff Joe Arpaio was convicted of criminal contempt for continuing to violate a 2011 federal order barring detaining Latinos solely because of suspected immigration status, though Trump later pardoned Arpaio.