The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals addressed a stinging blow to the Trump administration’s mass deportation project Friday night in a fiery opinion upholding a lower court’s block on “roving patrols” across much of Southern California.
“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.
The ruling leaves in place a temporary restraining order barring masked and heavily armed agents from snatching people off the streets of Southern California without first establishing reasonable suspicion that they are in the U.S. illegally.
Under the 4th Amendment, reasonable suspicion cannot be based solely on race, ethnicity, language, location or employment, either alone or in combination, U.S. District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong of Los Angeles wrote in her original order.
9th Circuit Judges Marsha S. Berzon, Jennifer Sung and Ronald M. Gould agreed.
“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,” the opinion said.
Fourth Amendment injunctions are hard to win, experts say. Plaintiffs must show not only that they were hurt, but that they are likely to be hurt again in the same way in the future.
