Left: President Donald Trump walks from Marine One after arriving on the South Lawn of the White House, Tuesday, July 15, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon, File). Right: Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem speaks during a roundtable at “Alligator Alcatraz,” a new migrant detention facility at Dade-Collier Training and Transition facility, Tuesday, July 1, 2025, in Ochopee, Fla. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci).
The Trump administration”s emergency demand for a stay has set the stage for the U.S. Supreme Court to allow or prevent U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) from stopping, questioning, detaining and potentially arresting people in a “roving” manner in California on the idea that an individual’s Hispanic appearance, speaking in Spanish or speaking English with an accent, day labor occupation, and location amount to “reasonable suspicion” of unlawful presence in the country.
The petitioners, led by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi, and represented by John Sauer, the U.S. solicitor general and former attorney for President Donald Trump, are challenging U.S. District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong’s block of sweeping and “roving” ICE raids on July 11.
In that temporary restraining order, Frimpong found that the plaintiffs were “likely to succeed in proving that the federal government is indeed conducting roving patrols without reasonable suspicion” — stopping people on the theory that Hispanic appearance, speaking Spanish, and line of work, factored individually or combined, were within the bounds of the law. In addition, the government had denied “access to lawyers,” all against the backdrop of an administration “arrest quota of 3,000 arrests per day.”
The plaintiffs consist of California residents Pedro Vasquez Perdomo, Carlos Alexander Osorto, Isaac Villegas Molina, Jorge Hernandez Viramontes, Jason Brian Gavidia, as well as immigration groups including the Los Angeles Worker Center Network, the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, Immigrant Defenders Law Center, and the United Farm Workers union.
The judge’s temporary restraining order recounted that Perdomo, Osorto, and Molina were arrested at a bus stop “as they were waiting to be picked up for a job.” Viramontes, Frimpong went on, is a U.S. Citizen who works at a car wash “that has been visited three times by immigration agents,” and he was “questioned and detained by agents.” Gavidia likewise told agents at a tow yard “multiple times that he is a U.S. Citizen,” yet he too was “stopped and questioned.”
Claims like these led Frimpong, an appointee of Joe Biden, to order the Trump administration to “stop” its “insufficient and impermissible” approach to establishing reasonable suspicion required under the Fourth Amendment.
“The factors that defendants appear to rely on for reasonable suspicion seem no more indicative of illegal presence in the country than of legal presence — such as working at low-wage occupations such as car wash attendants and day laborers,” the judge wrote.
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After the loss in court, the Trump administration appealed to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court for a stay and lost again.
The three-judge 9th Circuit panel — U.S. Circuit Judges Ronald M. Gould and Marsha S. Berzon, both Bill Clinton appointees, and U.S. Circuit Judge Jennifer Sung, a Biden appointee — penned a per curiam opinion agreeing with the lower court’s analysis that the Trump administration’s stops were unreasonable.
“We agree with the district court that, in the context of the Central District of California, the four enumerated factors at issue—apparent race or ethnicity, speaking Spanish or speaking English with an accent, particular location, and type of work, even when considered together—describe only a broad profile and ‘do not demonstrate reasonable suspicion for any particular stop.'”
The Trump administration has now reiterated its position before the Supreme Court, in a petition submitted to Justice Elena Kagan, requesting a swift halt to Frimpong’s order, through emergency relief in the form of an administrative stay and a stay pending appeal. Sauer insisted that having the government do more to establish reasonable suspicion and “under threat of contempt” is hampering ICE’s ability to enforce the law in a “major epicenter of the immigration crisis.”
“This case involves a district-court injunction that threatens to upend immigration officials’ ability to enforce the immigration laws in the Central District of California by hanging the prospect of contempt over every investigative stop of suspected illegal aliens,” the government’s application for a stay said. “Not only is the Central District the Nation’s most populous district overall; at best estimate, it harbors some 2 million illegal aliens out of its total population of nearly 20 million people, making it by far the largest destination for illegal aliens.”
Sauer said that a person “speaking Spanish or working construction” does not always rise to reasonable suspicion, but sometimes it does.
“But in many situations, such factors—alone or in combination—can heighten the likelihood that someone is unlawfully present in the United States, above and beyond the 1-in-10 baseline odds in the District,” the filing said. “U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents are entitled to rely on these factors when ramping up enforcement of immigration laws in the District.”
The government cast it as absurd that ICE “cannot detain anyone in the District solely based on those factors—not even after encountering someone who speaks only Spanish and works as a day laborer at a worksite that has been cited 30 times for hiring illegal aliens as day laborers” and suggested they’re walking on eggshells after Frimpong’s “unlawful, blunderbuss” of an injunction and “attempted judicial usurpation of immigration-enforcement functions.”
“This injunction inflicts manifest irreparable harm on the government. The injunction wrongly brands countless lawful stops as unconstitutional, thereby hampering a basic law-enforcement tool, while turning every single stop in the District into a potential contempt trap,” the filing continued. “No agent can confidently enforce the law and engage in routine stops when the district court may later refuse to credit that the stop reflected additional, permissible factors and instead treat virtually any stop as contemptuous misconduct.”
The upshot here is that there’s yet another opportunity for the Supreme Court to intervene on the issue of the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement tactics, judicial involvement that has gone for and against the president in deportation cases.
Chris Perez contributed to this report.
