Last month, a federal judge in Los Angeles handed down a temporary order placing some restrictions on the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown in that city. The Trump administration now wants the Supreme Court to lift those restrictions.
The contested provisions of Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong’s order are fairly narrow. They provide that federal law enforcement may not rely “solely” on four factors when determining to stop or detain someone suspected of being an undocumented immigrant. Under Frimpong’s order, the government may not stop or detain someone solely because of 1) their “apparent race or ethnicity,” 2) the fact that they either speak Spanish or speak English with an accent, 3) their presence at a location such as an agricultural workplace or day laborer pick-up site, or 4) the type of work that they do.
Frimpong’s order prohibits the government from relying exclusively on any one of these factors or on any combination of them, so it could not detain someone solely because they speak Spanish and they are a day laborer, for example. The government may still rely on these four factors to determine whom to stop or detain, however, so long as it has other reasons for targeting a particular individual.
Thus, for example, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) could target someone because that person speaks Spanish, and they work as a day laborer, and they were witnessed getting into a truck owned by a company known for hiring undocumented immigrants, because one of the three factors that ICE considered in this hypothetical stop is not on Frimpong’s list.
That said, at least according to the Cato Institute’s David Bier, Frimpong’s order has drastically reduced the number of immigration arrests within Los Angeles.
The central issue in this case, known as Noem v. Perdomo, is what courts are practically able to do in order to rein in overzealous tactics by law enforcement. Judge Frimpong’s order is modest — again, it does not prevent the Trump administration from targeting anyone, just as long as part of the reason why a particular individual is targeted doesn’t appear on Frimpong’s list of four — but it is also unlikely to survive contact with a Republican Supreme Court that is extraordinarily solicitous toward Donald Trump.
Indeed, the Court has long cautioned lower court judges against issuing broad orders imposing across-the-board restrictions on law enforcement. One of the seminal cases that the Trump administration relied upon in its Perdomo brief was handed down in 1983, well before the Court’s recent partisan turn.
The Republican justices, in other words, likely will not even need to stretch the law very far if they want to rule in Trump’s favor in Perdomo.
What is ICE up to in Los Angeles?
The Perdomo case arises out of multiple immigration raids in Los Angeles, which have often taken place at job sites and other locations where the Trump administration believes that undocumented immigrants are often present. As Frimpong found, “car wash workers, farm and agricultural workers, street vendors, recycling center workers, tow yard workers, and packing house workers were targeted.” One early operation “detained multiple day laborers outside of the Westlake Home Depot.”
At least some of these operations appear to violate the Constitution. In some instances, law enforcement appears to have targeted people because of their race. Frimpong, for example, pointed to an incident where “agents approached and prevented a nonwhite individual from walking away but not those who appeared to be Caucasians.” A Latino car wash worker targeted by one of the raids testified that the federal agents who arrested him ignored two of his light-skinned coworkers, one of whom is Russian and another who is Persian.
In other cases, federal agents appear to have targeted individuals despite having no reasonable grounds to believe they are undocumented. Plaintiff Jason Brian Gavidia, for example, is an American who was born in Los Angeles. According to an appeals court that upheld nearly all of Frimpong’s order, agents “forcefully pushed [Gavidia] up against the metal gated fence, put [his] hands behind [his] back, and twisted [his] arm” after he was unable to identify which hospital he was born in.
The agents eventually released Gavidia after he produced a Real ID card, a document that is only issued to people who are legally present in the United States, but they took his ID.
It is quite difficult to obtain a federal injunction against law enforcement officials
It is likely, in other words, that at least some of the people targeted by these Los Angeles raids could individually challenge their arrests or detention in court. But the ability to bring such individual challenges often isn’t worth very much.
For starters, the Republican justices’ decisions in Hernández v. Mesa (2020) and Egbert v. Boule (2022) likely make it impossible to collect money damages from an ICE agent who violates your constitutional rights. In Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents (1971), the Supreme Court held that federal law enforcement officers who violate someone’s constitutional rights may be personally liable for that violation. But Hernández and Egbert read that decision so narrowly that such suits rarely, if ever, move forward.
So, even if someone like Gavidia brings a successful lawsuit, he probably wouldn’t win anything more than the right to get his ID back.
Someone who is unlawfully detained could potentially obtain a court order demanding their release. But many people targeted by law enforcement lack access to legal counsel or cannot afford to hire a lawyer even if they can find one who will take their case. While indigent criminal defendants have a right to a government-paid lawyer, defendants in immigration proceedings typically do not. And even when immigration defendants do prevail, an occasional court decision declaring some long-past arrest illegal is unlikely to deter future illegal arrests.
Yet, the Supreme Court has long discouraged federal judges from issuing injunctions that forbid law enforcement from acting illegally in the future. The key case is City of Los Angeles v. Lyons (1983), which held that Adolph Lyons, a man who was allegedly choked out by police officers without provocation, could not obtain a court order forbidding LA’s police from using such chokeholds in the future.
“Past exposure to illegal conduct,” Justice Byron White wrote for the Court in Lyons, does not permit someone to seek an injunction. Rather, “Lyons’ standing to seek the injunction requested depended on whether he was likely to suffer future injury from the use of the chokeholds by police officers.”
Indeed, White’s decision placed nearly impossible barriers before most plaintiffs seeking court orders requiring police to modify their behavior. To obtain such an injunction, White wrote, Lyons “would have had not only to allege that he would have another encounter with the police, but also to make the incredible assertion either (1) that all police officers in Los Angeles always choke any citizen with whom they happen to have an encounter, whether for the purpose of arrest, issuing a citation, or for questioning, or (2) that the City ordered or authorized police officers to act in such manner.”
At least some of the plaintiffs in Perdomo present an unusually strong case that they are likely to be caught up in an immigration raid again in the future. According to the appeals court which heard this case, “at least one individual with lawful status was stopped twice by roving patrols in just 10 days.” So a court could quite reasonably conclude that this individual is “likely to suffer” the “future injury” that Lyons demands.
But Lyons also places such a high bar in front of plaintiffs seeking an injunction against law enforcement that it would not be difficult for the Republican justices to write an opinion relying on Lyons to toss out Judge Frimpong’s order, assuming that they even bother to explain their decision in the first place — something that the Court’s Republican majority often refuses to do.
In addition to arguing that Lyons requires the Supreme Court to block Frimpong’s decision, Trump’s lawyers also point to the Court’s recent decision in Trump v. CASA (2025), which held that federal courts typically should not issue injunctions that extend beyond the individual parties to a lawsuit. So, even if the one plaintiff who was stopped twice may obtain an injunction, that court order might have to be so narrow that it protects him and him alone against future illegal stops.
Trump’s CASA argument is hardly airtight. Though CASA did hold that broad injunctions are generally discouraged, it did permit them when necessary to give a victorious plaintiff “complete relief.” Frimpong argued that a broad injunction is warranted in Perdomo, because law enforcement officers cannot reasonably be expected to know which suspects are protected by a court order.
“It would be a fantasy to expect that law enforcement could and would inquire whether a given individual was among the [plaintiffs] before proceeding with a seizure,” she wrote. The only way to stop ICE from targeting the Perdomo plaintiffs is to issue a court order that protects everyone in Los Angeles.
Will that argument persuade a majority of the justices? The honest answer is, “Who knows?” CASA is a brand new decision, handed down less than two months ago, and the Court has yet to apply its new rule to the facts of any specific case — including the CASA case itself.
And the fact remains that it is exceedingly difficult to obtain any injunction against law enforcement, much less the broadly applicable one handed down by Judge Frimpong. The Supreme Court has generally preferred for judges to adjudicate alleged legal violations by law enforcement one at a time, rather than issuing wholesale injunctions halting an illegal practice — even though individual decisions often do little to stop these practices.
At least some parts of Frimpong’s order are probably overly broad
In fairness, there are some good reasons to prefer individual lawsuits over wholesale court orders. Fourth Amendment search and seizure cases typically turn on the very specific facts of a particular case. Police might reasonably suspect, for example, that a person spotted with a large wad of cash in a neighborhood where illegal drugs are often sold is engaged in illegal activity. By contrast, police may not have reasonable grounds to suspect a similar person spotted walking near a business where people often make down payments on their new homes.
As a general rule, the Fourth Amendment permits police to briefly stop and search someone if they reasonably suspect that person is engaged in illegal activity — or, in an immigration case, of being illegally present in the United States.
To be sure, there are some things that law enforcement may almost never consider when determining whether to stop a particular individual. In Kansas v. Glover (2020), for example, the Court said that police may not target someone based on “nothing more than a demographic profile” or stop and question someone about their immigration status because of their “Mexican ancestry.”
Frimpong’s conclusion that ICE may not target someone solely because of their “apparent race or ethnicity” is consistent with Glover.
But Frimpong’s conclusion that law enforcement may never reasonably suspect someone of being undocumented solely based on their presence in a particular location is probably a bit of a stretch. As a federal appeals court explained in a 2014 case, day laborer jobs are “one of the limited options for workers without documents.” These jobs are often grueling, unreliable, and underpaid. They are unattractive to virtually anyone who is authorized to work in the United States and, thus, have less-demanding and better-paying job options available to them.
There are at least some cases, in other words, where a law enforcement officer could reasonably suspect someone of being undocumented if they are consistently seen at a location where undocumented workers seek jobs as day laborers — what Frimpong described as a “day laborer pick up site.”
It is difficult to come up with categorical rules governing which factors law enforcement may consider when deciding whom to stop. Even race may be an acceptable factor in very limited circumstances; if multiple witnesses to a robbery tell police that they saw an East Asian man commit the crime, for example, then police could reasonably limit their search to people who appear to be East Asian. This is one reason why cases like Lyons exist: to prevent judges from handing down categorical rules that prevent police from conducting lawful investigations.
The current Supreme Court is far too sycophantic towards Donald Trump, but that does not change the fact that courts are poorly situated to deal with a rogue executive. The executive branch can move quickly, potentially committing thousands of constitutional violations before judges even begin to figure out what happened in those cases. Similarly, practical limits on judicial power can tie judges’ hands when they are confronted with rogue law enforcement agencies.
