Los Angeles (AP) – Federal Court of Appeal ruled on Friday night to maintain the temporary order of the lower court, blocking the Trump administration to conduct indiscriminate immigration and arrests in South California.
A panel of the three Judicial Court of Appeal of the United States held a hearing on Monday afternoon, in which the federal government asked the court to annul a temporary restraining order issued on July 12 by Judge Maam E. Fripong, claiming that it had prevented their implementation of the Immigration Act.
Immigrant law enforcement groups filed a lawsuit last month, accusing President Donald Trump’s administration of systematically targeting people with brown skin in southern California during the illegal immigration administration. The court included three detained immigrants and two US citizens as plaintiffs.
In her order, Fripong said there was a “mountain of evidence” that federal tactics for the implementation of immigration violate the constitution. She wrote that the government could not use factors such as an obvious race or ethnicity, speaking Spanish or English with an accent, a place to be on a place to tow or a car wash, or someone’s profession as the only basis for reasonable suspicion of keeping anyone.
The Los Angeles region has been a battlefield with the Trump administration because of its aggressive immigration strategy that has caused protests and the deployment of national guards and marines for several weeks. Federal agents have rounded immigrants without legal status to be in the United States from domestic landfills, car washes, bus stops and farms, many of which have been living in the country for decades.
Among the plaintiffs is Los Angeles resident Brian Gavidi, who was shown in a video made by a friend on June 13, who was seized by federal agents as she screams: “I was born here in the United States, East La Bro!”
They want to “send us back to a world where an American citizen … can be grabbed, stuck on a fence and to take his phone and identity, just because he worked in a yard of towing in a Latin American neighborhood,” the US prosecutor of the Union of Civil Freedoms Mohammed Taizar told the court.
The federal government claims that it was not given enough time to collect and present evidence in the case, given that it was filed shortly before the holiday on July 4 and the next week was heard.
“It is very serious to say that numerous federal government agencies have a policy to violate the constitution,” said lawyer Jacob Roth.
He also claims that the order of the lower court is too wide and that immigrants’ defenders do not provide sufficient evidence to prove that the government has an official policy to stop people without reasonable suspicion.
He referred to the four factors of race, language, a place and profession, which were listed in the temporary restraining order, saying that the court should not forbid the government from using them. He also claims that the order is not unclear what is permissible under the law.
“I legally think it is appropriate to use the factors of reasonable suspicion,” Roth said
The judges sharply called the government about their arguments.
“No one has assumed that you cannot look at these factors at all,” said Jennifer Sung.
However, these factors only form a “broad profile” and do not satisfy the reasonable standard of suspicion of stopping someone, she said.
Sung, appointed to Biden, said that in an area like Los Angeles, where Latinos make up as much as half of the population, these factors “possibly cannot eliminate those who have undocumented status and those who have a documented legal status.”
She also asked, “What is the harm to tell you not to do something that you claim that you are not doing anymore?”