A California federal judge signaled Thursday that she is likely to order immigration agents to stop arresting people without warrants unless they determine they are likely to escape.
In a tentative ruling, U.S. District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong appeared inclined to grant a preliminary injunction blocking the Department of Homeland Security’s alleged mass warrantless arrest policy in the Central District of California.
The tentative ruling comes as part of a lawsuit filed last year by the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, Public Counsel and other groups and private attorneys calling to end unlawful stops and arrests and for the protection of due process and access to counsel rights for people in immigration detention.
In a June motion for the preliminary injunction, lawyers for the plaintiffs argued that agents continue to make arrests without first establishing that the people they arrest are likely to escape before a warrant can be obtained, as required by federal law. The lawyers asked that Frimpong bar immigration agents from arresting people in the district — which encompasses Los Angeles, Orange, Ventura, Riverside, San Bernardino, Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties — unless they’ve conducted an escape risk analysis.
“This is significant, because we know that the government’s policy is to arrest as many individuals as possible without asking any questions,” said Mayra Joachín, an attorney at the ACLU of Southern California, after a hearing on the motion Thursday morning. “By conducting the proper escape risk analysis we anticipate that the number of people who are being arrested in this district will plummet.”
It’s unclear when Frimpong will issue her ruling.
Federal judges in Portland, Colorado, Washington, D.C. and the Eastern District of California have blocked similar warrantless arrest practices.
Daniel Mummolo, with the Department of Justice, pushed back during the Thursday hearing, telling Frimpong that a warrantless arrest policy “does not exist either in written or unwritten form.”
“We would urge the court to reverse its tentative ruling,” he said. “We think the preliminary injunction should be denied.”
In the event that Frimpong grants the injunction, Mummolo asked her to stay the order for 14 days so they could consider appealing to the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.
Laura Perry Stone with Munger, Tolles & Olson, one of the law firms representing the plaintiffs, asked the judge to clarify her final ruling to ensure that immigration agents have to consider both whether a person is likely to leave a location before a warrant can be obtained and also the likelihood that the person can be found at a second identifiable location.
“Both prongs … are essential,” Perry Stone said.
Requiring only the first prong, she said, would obliterate any need for agents to make an assessment of a person’s ties to the community.
Perry Stone also asked Frimpong to require the government to provide arrest documentation to ensure its compliance.
In the motion for the injunction, lawyers for the plaintiffs noted that a review of arrest narratives produced by the government showed that at least 89 of 113 arrests — nearly 80% — “contain either no escape risk assessment whatsoever … or generally follow an escape risk template narrative”.
“For the narratives that contain some discussion of “flight risk”, it is largely boilerplate,” the motion states.
During the hearing, Mummolo maintained that the “overwhelming majority” of the arrest records included a discussion of flight risk but added that agents were “not required to document that.”
