US appeals court keeps bar on Los Angeles federal immigration arrests

(Reuters) : A federal appeals court late on Friday affirmed a lower court’s decision temporarily barring U.S. government agents from making immigration-related arrests in Los Angeles without probable cause.

Rejecting the Trump administration’s request to pause the lower court’s order, the three-judge appeals panel ruled that the plaintiffs would likely be able to prove that federal agents had carried out arrests based on peoples’ appearance, language and where they lived or worked.

President Donald Trump called National Guard troops and U.S. Marines into Los Angeles in June in response to protests against the immigration raids, marking an extraordinary use of military force to support civilian police operations within the United States.

The city of Los Angeles and other Southern California municipalities joined a lawsuit filed in June by the American Civil Liberties Union accusing federal agents of using unlawful police tactics such as racial profiling to meet immigration arrest quotas set by the administration.

A California judge last month blocked the Trump administration from racially profiling immigrants as it seeks deportation targets and from denying immigrants’ right to access to lawyers during their detention.

In Friday’s unsigned decision, the judges of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit largely rejected the administration’s appeal of the temporary restraining order.

The judges agreed with the lower court in blocking federal officials from detaining people based solely on “apparent race or ethnicity,” speaking Spanish or accented English, or being at locations such as a “bus stop, car wash, tow yard, day laborer pick up site, agricultural site, etc.”

The Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement did not immediately respond to requests for comment outside business hours.

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass called the order a victory for the city. “The Temporary Restraining Order that has been protecting our communities from immigration agents using racial profiling and other illegal tactics when conducting their cruel and aggressive enforcement raids and sweeps will remain in place for now,” she said in a statement.

Mohammad Tajsar, senior staff attorney at the ACLU Foundation of Southern California, welcomed the ruling in statement: “This decision is further confirmation that the administration’s paramilitary invasion of Los Angeles violated the Constitution and caused irreparable injury across the region.”