Judge Tells Border Officers (Again!) That They Can’t Arrest Migrants Without Real Warrants

The courts keep pounding the nails home. What this government is engaged in is illegal, on multiple levels. If you subtract the pro-MAGA Fifth Circuit and 6/9ths of the Supreme Court, you have a judicial quorum that says rights are still rights, despite this administration’s claims otherwise.

DHS has issued memos claiming (without facts or law in evidence) that officers can arrest people and enter homes without signed judicial warrants. This has always been false. And it’s not edging any closer to the truth no matter what this administration might say in Truth Social posts and/or court filings.

The administration is losing repeatedly in its bigoted war on non-whites. But it never accepts obvious defeat. It always heads back to court, full of steam and bullshit. And, in most cases, its losses are even more obvious the second time around.

A federal judge in California found on Wednesday that U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials had violated a previous order regarding warrantless arrests, and ordered agents operating in her judicial district to fully document their reasons for making any future stops.

The judge, Jennifer L. Thurston of the Federal District Court for the Eastern District of California, had previously found that immigration operations in Kern County, Calif., appeared to have been based on racial profiling, with agents making arrests when people they stopped could not produce proof of citizenship on the spot. Last year, she restricted the agency from continuing to carry out random immigration sweeps in the region, citing a “pattern and practice of agents performing detentive stops without reasonable suspicion.”

On Wednesday, Judge Thurston found that border agents appeared to have violated that order when they carried out an immigration sweep last year in a Home Depot parking lot in Sacramento.

The opinion [PDF] doesn’t cut corners or grant Trump’s DOJ more respect than it has earned. (It’s running in the red at the moment.) Multiple people who were arrested following a “targeted” operation, that saws mostly involved federal officers waiting in a Home Depot parking lot in hopes of rounding up day laborers, sued the government. The government has already lost once. This order clearly explains why the government is losing twice. Pretending conjecture is the same thing as established facts does nothing more than inform the court that you suck at your job.

The surveillance two days earlier somewhat contributes to understanding the statistical relationship, revealing that on one prior occasion, two out of a group of 20 individuals gathered in that location were noncitizens (roughly 10%). Yet, that statistic, which leaves the remaining 90% of the group unclassified, does little to dispel the concern that seeking work as a day laborer may be “[a] characteristic common to both legal and illegal immigrants.” See Manzo-Jurado, 457 F.3d at 937. Nor does it demonstrate that the Home Depot parking lot is used “predominantly” by noncitizens seeking day labor work.33 See id. at 936. Rather, the present record reveals little more than that the Home Depot parking lot is “a location . . . frequented by illegal immigrants, but also by many legal residents, [which] is not significantly probative to an assessment of reasonable suspicion.”

Yep. Fuck your “Kavanaugh stops.” Probable cause has never been “wow, they look kinda Mexican.” Hanging around places where you have a [checks government’s claims in support of its actions] 10% chance of catching illegal immigrants isn’t “probable.” It’s an inadvertent admission that you might be wrong 90% of the time.

The upshot of the ruling is this: The government needs to provide individualized reasonable suspicion, if not actual probable cause, to arrest migrants in California. The court does grant some concessions this DOJ definitely hasn’t earned, but at least it adds some guardrails:

The Court declines to preclude Defendants from using “boilerplate” when documenting stops and/or arrests pursuant to the PI Order and this clarification. However, Defendants are cautioned that copy and paste language may give rise to an inference that an individualized assessment was not made.

In short, if the government wants to claim its anti-migrant arrests are supported by reasonable suspicion and/or probable cause, it needs to show its work. And if the only work it can show has been cribbed from other cases, it should expect its overtures to be rejected by the court.

While this may not seem like much, it is at least worth the paper it’s printed on. The Trump administration seems incapable of flooding the zone at this point. It ran out of energy (and personnel) barely over a year into its unexpected resurrection. The DOJ no longer has enough lawyers to do everything the administration demands of it, much less press the dubious “but I’m a king tho” assertions Trump seems to feel it should be doing day in and day out.

Running a fast-break offense and a bet-you-miss defense only works until it doesn’t. The courts are delivering a counter-flood and the DOJ doesn’t have enough loyalists left to overpower the full-court press. The administration is headed towards an institutional collapse because whatever can be considered the “center” of this whirlpool of bigoted fuckwits will never hold. We’ll take every win we can get until we can finally celebrate the demise of a president who seems to think he’s the King George incarnation that makes his voter base so erect it will vote against its own interests.