The California Border Patrol is searching for a violation of the court order

from Wendy Fry and Sergio OlmosCalMatters

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A federal judge ruled that Border Patrol agents continued to make illegal stops and arrests after she ordered them to leave.

In a succinctly worded decision printed Thursday morningthe judge wrote that agents “again detained people without reasonable suspicion,” relying on broad assumptions about day laborers instead of concrete evidence of immigration violations.

The ruling by Judge Jennifer Thurston of the Eastern District of California granted the United Farm Workers’ request to enforce a preliminary injunction the judge issued last year. This proposal prohibits Border Patrol agents from detaining people in California’s Central Valley without documenting the specific facts and reasons for the stops. According to one legal expert, the ruling gives the Trump administration a chance to comply before the fallout escalates.

Thurston made that point during a hearing last year, telling the federal government, “You just can’t go to brown people and say, ‘Give me your papers.’

Thurston’s original order also prohibits agents from making warrantless arrests without first determining whether a person is a flight risk.

Home Depot raid in Sacramento

At the center of the case is an operation from July in Sacramento, where agents swarms from the Home Depot parking lotdetention of a group of day laborers. They arrested 11 noncitizens and one U.S. citizen, according to court records.

After the Sacramento attack, Gregory Bovino, then-Chief of the Border Patrol, stood outside the state Capitol building in Sacramento and told Fox News that “Sacramento is not a sanctuary city. The state of California is not a sanctuary state. There is no sanctuary anywhere.”

Thurston, who is based in Fresno, said the inspection in Sacramento violated her order from last year, which stemmed from similar raids in Kern County.

“Agents detained these individuals, demanded to see their ‘documents,’ and questioned them about their immigration status, all without any legal basis for doing so,” Thurston wrote.

The Border Patrol did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Verification based on observation?

Attorneys for the federal government have argued in court documents that the Home Depot parking lot sweep was based on surveillance, intelligence and what agents described as “common knowledge” that workers congregate in Home Depot parking lots. The government claims federal agents used surveillance video overlooking Home Depot and surrounding areas that suggested the use of a drone.

Thursday’s ruling raises questions about how the Border Patrol documents its operations. Agents filed nearly identical reports on multiple arrests while their own names were redacted from government records. Some of their records had inaccuracies or could not be matched to specific individuals. In some cases, it was unclear who authored their reports.

In one case, an agent wrote that he arrested someone after a “short chase.”

The judge found that the walking distance from Home Depot to the location of the arrest was a twelve-minute walk and that the arrest documentation was “inaccurate and insufficient.”

Thurston also found that Border Patrol records did not meet the requirements in her previous order to document specific facts and reasons for each stop and arrest.

Cavanaugh Stops Controversy

The types of stops that don’t rely on reasonable suspicion, which became known as “Cavanaugh stops” last year after an opinion by Supreme Court Justice Brett Cavanaugh, faced a separate legal challenge in another case that reached the nation’s highest court. The Supreme Court ruled in September that it could stay a temporary restraining order issued by a lower court in Los Angeles against such detentions without cause. But U.S. District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong wrote that the Supreme Court’s decision did not bless these types of stops, writing, “The Supreme Court has not issued any rulings that say what the government did in Los Angeles — and appears to continue to do — was legal.”

Judge Thurston, appointed by Biden in late 2021, denied the UFW’s request to force Border Patrol agents to undergo additional training to comply with the preliminary injunction, although she said she expected agents on the ground to immediately comply with the court’s order.

The decision was sealed for 14 days so that “personal information” and “sensitive law enforcement information,” such as the names of Border Patrol agents, could be redacted.

“The decision supports what we’ve been saying all along: You can’t just stop people because they’re brown and working class.” said Elizabeth Strather, vice president of the United Farm Workers.

“Judicial Restraint”

Kevin Johnson, a UC Davis School of Law professor whose work focuses on immigration and civil rights, said the judge was exercising judicial restraint by allowing the Trump administration to enforce its preliminary injunction. However, the consequences can escalate.

“It’s part of a process and penalties can increase later,” Johnson said. “Now she’s just saying to comply with the order, but later she can impose fines and penalties.”

Johnson said the penalties could even increase to criminal contempt if the Border Patrol and the federal government continue to ignore Thurston’s order. He cited a 2017 case in which former Maricopa County (Ariz.) Sheriff Joe Arpaio was convicted of criminal contempt for continuing to violate a 2011 federal court order barring him from detaining Hispanics solely because of their presumed immigration status.

Trump later pardoned him.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and is republished under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license.