By Richard Hernandez
Federal officials acknowledge there has been a lull in anti-illegal immigration law enforcement in most of Southern California since U.S. District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong’s July 12 ruling which prevented federal immigration officials from conducting “roving patrols” aimed at finding and detaining those who fit what the Donald Trump Administration maintains is a logically-derived and therefore constitutional profile of individuals likely to be in the country illegally. Nevertheless, federal officials say their effort to ascertain the citizenship status and deport those who do not have current visas or permission to be in the country will in a very short time resume with even more intensity than before.
After hearing the July 10 testimony of Sean Skedzielewski, counsel to the Assistant Attorney General for the United States Department of Justice, who offered a defense of the aggressive immigration enforcement activities the federal government had initiated in early June and explaining what grounds the government was using to determine whom agents stopped and what constituted reasonable suspicion about those who had been arrested, Judge Frimpong said there was a “mountain of evidence,” Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s actions violated the Fourth Amendment’s protections against unreasonable searches and seizures and the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of due process. According to Judge Frimpong, using race, ethnicity, language, accent, physical whereabouts or employment as a basis for immigration enforcement runs afoul of the 4th Amendment and its prohibition barring unreasonable searches and seizures by the government. She said the available evidence indicated the federal government was engaged in racial profiling in that they were using race, the work people were engaged in, their location, and their language to form “reasonable suspicion,” to detain those arrested on charges of being in the country illegally.
That “reasonable suspicion” was unreasonably derived, the judge said.
Judge Frimpong ordered the Trump administration to halt indiscriminate immigration stops and arrests in Los Angeles, Riverside, San Bernardino, Orange, Ventura, Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties. She further issued an order that such detaining cease forthwith and issued a secondary order that those in custody at Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s downtown B-18 detention facility be given 24-hour access to lawyers and a phone line unmonitored and untapped by the government.
The Trump Administration appealed Judge Frimpong’s decision. It was taken up by the United States Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit. The matter was entrusted to a 9th Circuit panel of three justices, those being Judges Marsha S. Berzon, Jennifer Sung and Ronald M. Gould.
In making the appeal, the Trump Administration had requested a stay of Judge Frimpong’s ruling, asserting irreparable harm would ensue as the interruption of the government’s effort to locate and arrest illegal aliens would allow many dangerous individuals to evade capture and remain in the country.
Deputy Assistant Attorney General Yaakov Roth asserted that Judge Frimpong was in error in that the government had in all cases met the burden of abiding by the Fourth Amendment and that none of the arrests had been effectuated indiscriminately.
At a hearing on Monday July 28, Roth offered the government’s position that the operations were within the guidelines of the constitutional protections that all Americans enjoy, and he maintained that Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents were not acting arbitrarily in identifying suspects based on a host of criteria and information available to them, extending to race, ethnicity, language, location, and occupation. Judges Berzon, Sung and Gould essentially upheld Judge Frimpong, concluding the Trump Administration was arbitrarily arresting those accused of being in the country illegally, violating the Fourth Amendment in the process. The three-judge panel rejected the appeal and denied the Trump Administration’s request that Judge Frimpong’s ruling be stayed, stating the federal government would not suffer irreparable injury “by an injunction aimed at preventing a subset of stops not supported by reasonable suspicion.”
While the Frimpong and 9th Circuit Court of Appeals rulings put a crimp in the Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations throughout Southern California, reducing the number of detentions and initiated and completed deportations by more than 70 percent in the ensuing month, it did cease immigration enforcement in the Southland altogether. Both personnel and equipment remain in place at federal facilities and staging areas. An appeal of the 9th Circuit ruling has been made to the U.S. Supreme Court. The federal government contends in that appeal that the plaintiffs in the case – Pedro Vasquez Perdomo, Carlos Alexander Osorto, Isaac Antonio Villegas Molina, Jason Brian Gavidia and Jorge Luis Hernandez Viramontes and their legal representatives the American Civil Liberties Union, Public Counsel and a handful of private attorneys had falsely asserted that federal agents were using ethnicity or race alone as the basis for detaining specific individuals. In actuality, according to the federal government, while race or ethnicity alone does not constituted the grounds for a search or arrest, taken in conjunction with other factors provides agents of the government with lawful and constitutional authority to detain individuals to ascertain whether they are in the midst of the commission of a crime. Judge Frimpong and the 9th Circuit did not accurately determine whether the “totality of circumstances” including ethnicity or race might constitute reasonable suspicion in the underlying cases relating to Perdomo, Osorto, Molina, Gavidia, Viramontes in making their analyses, of whether U.S. government agents can interrogate individuals about whether they are lawfully in the United States, according to the government’s lawyers. The Trump Administration has asked for a speedy resolution of the appeal, and they anticipate a ruling before the end of September.
In the meantime, the Sentinel has learned, those heading the immigration enforcement effort in Southern California – Immigration Czar Tom Homan, U.S. Attorney for the Central District of California Bilal Essayli, Andre Quinones, a deputy field office director for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Kyle Harvick, an agent overseeing the Border Patrol office in El Centro in Imperial County – have refined the policy and techniques they have already begun to apply and which will be brought into full use once the Supreme Court makes its ruling on the 9th Circuit’s upholding of Judge Frimpong. With three of the current Supreme Court justices having been appointed by President Trump and three others appointed by so-called conservatives, it is the troika’s calculation that Judge Frimpong’s order will be vacated. Moreover, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol agents have been relying on a wide variety of indicators, including ones derived through technical means, to support the findings of probable cause in carrying out immigration enforcement operations. These include emanations from electronic devices in the possession of suspected illegal aliens that make for a prima facie case that individuals in possession of those items – smart phones and cell phones – are undocumented aliens.
Agents in the field have been given explicit instructions that they should use the technology available to them, extending to body cameras, in-vehicle cameras, cellphones, in-vehicle computers and laptop computers, to scrupulously document operations from beginning to end, capturing images and statements of those targeted and anything encountered in the field, either before or after suspects are engaged with, which would support or reinforce the adducing of probable cause.
The Sentinel has been told that supervisors at the various detention facilities for suspected and actual illegal immigrants, the B-18 holding area in downtown Los Angeles, the facility in Santa Ana and the Adelanto ICE Processing Center among them, have been instructed to revive the past practice of surveying the captive population very closely through morning and evening walk-throughs, giving those in custody who might be U.S. citizens inadvertently caught up in a raid, those with dual citizenship and those who might have the legal right to be present in the United States an opportunity to make such a claim before they are placed on a bus to Tijuana via San Ysidro.
The department has also, the Sentinel has learned, begun on a small scale and intends to expand to large scale infiltration of bilingual agents into the captive population to gather information and intelligence useful in both deportation processing and future operations.
The Trump Administration previously used California National Guard and Marine Corps troops to provide logistical and security support to Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol agents carrying out operations primarily in Los Angeles County in June and July before criticism of utilizing military personnel in a civilian context resulted in having those service members withdrawn. Extremely reliable sources tell the Sentinel that in recent weeks, Homan, in phone conversations with President Trump, has discussed highly focused operations targeting individuals in the country illegally whose criminal history goes beyond simply violating immigration law and involves serious crimes such as murder, armed robbery, drug trafficking, rape, human trafficking and livestock theft. In those operations, Homan has proposed and President Trump reportedly fully supports, using military personnel side-by-side in effectuating arrests. During one such conversation, Homan told the president, it was conveyed to the Sentinel, that he shared his determination to prevent “criminals from roaming the streets of America unhindered.”
The Sentinel is informed that President Trump is determined, in the aftermath of the upcoming Supreme Court ruling on Judge Frimpong’s order which he believes will unshackle his hands on the immigration issue, to be even more aggressive and place a higher priority on the Department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s operations in California than the currently ongoing crackdowns in New York City and Washington, D.C., Midway Blitz in Chicago and Operation Patriot in Boston. This is because California is home to more illegal aliens – an estimated 2.3 million – than any other state in the country. Moreover, President Trump is angered by sanctuary declarations by Governor Gavin Newsom, Democratic members of the California legislature and mayors and other officials in various cities in California.
Those unregistered foreigners who have had their pace of residence traced, those day laborers congregating in places recognized by authorities to draw illegal immigrants, those employed by companies which have demonstrated a propensity for employing unregistered migrants in the past, those employed in marginal “professions” which have traditionally attracted foreigners who are not present in the United States legally, workers who hold jobs that formerly paid decent wages to American-born or naturalized American citizens but which now have seen hourly wages drop to the level of the state’s minimum wage or below it and workers being paid “under the table” are going to be targeted for removal from the country in coming weeks.