A federal judge late on Tuesday blocked the Trump administration from making widespread immigration arrests in the nation’s capital without warrants or probable cause that the person would be an imminent flight risk.
The US district judge Beryl Howell in Washington granted a preliminary injunction sought by civil liberties and immigrants’ rights groups in a lawsuit against the US Department of Homeland Security.
The lawsuit alleged that since Donald Trump declared an emergency in Washington in August, there has been a pattern of widespread, unlawful immigration arrests. Community members have reported living in fear of being stopped while driving or walking through their neighborhoods and many have avoided going to work, walking children to school or other daily activities in an attempt to avoid checkpoints and immigration enforcement agents.
Officers making civil immigration arrests generally have to have an administrative warrant. Under the Immigration and Nationality Act, they may make arrests without a warrant only if they have probable cause to believe the person is in the US illegally and is likely to escape before a warrant can be obtained, according to Howell’s ruling.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and other plaintiffs’ attorneys argued that federal officers were frequently patrolling and setting up checkpoints in Washington DC neighborhoods with large numbers of Latino immigrants and then stopping and arresting people indiscriminately.
They provided sworn declarations from people they say were arrested without warrants or a required assessment of flight risk and cited public statements by administration officials that they said showed the administration was not using the probable cause standard.
Attorneys for the administration denied it had a policy allowing such arrests.
Ama Frimpong, the legal director for Maryland-based immigrant advocacy organization Casa, which is also a plaintiff on the lawsuit, said the ruling is a relief for community members who have been afraid to conduct their daily lives in Washington.
“You had community members who had been stopped several times as they were going to school,” she said. “At least being able to have this positive ruling gives hope that someone who drops off their child at school might actually make it back home instead of being unlawfully arrested and swept to a detention center, and then rapidly deported without any due process whatsoever.”
Still, it might take some community members time to start to trust that they are safe on the streets, she said. “I don’t think change is going to happen overnight,” she said. “It’s been three, four months of just fear that we have been living with in the city, and 10 or 11 months of utter, deliberate attack on the immigrant community.”
“I do believe that our community is going to feel a renewed sense of confidence and security,” she added. “I certainly hope to see that people are going to be able to resume normal life activities without that fear and threat hanging over their head.”
Austin Rose, an attorney with Amica Center’s Immigration Impact Lab in Washington, which is another plaintiff, said he hopes the decision will help to reduce and mitigate the scope of arrests. He pointed out that the order also allows plaintiffs to monitor the government’s compliance in the future.
Howell, who was nominated to the bench by Barack Obama, a Democrat, said the plaintiffs had “established a substantial likelihood of an unlawful policy and practice by defendants of conducting warrantless civil immigration arrests without probable cause”.
“Defendants’ systemic failure to apply the probable cause standard, including the failure to consider escape risk, directly violates” immigration law and the Department of Homeland Security’s implementing regulations, she said.
In addition to blocking the policy, Howell ordered any agent who conducts a warrantless civil immigration arrest in Washington to document “the specific, particularized facts that supported the agent’s pre-arrest probable cause to believe that the person is likely to escape before a warrant can be obtained”.
The judge also required the government to submit that documentation to plaintiffs’ attorneys.
The ruling is similar to two others in federal lawsuits that also involved the ACLU, one in Colorado and another in California.
Another judge had issued a restraining order barring federal agents from stopping people based solely on their race, language, job or location in the Los Angeles area after finding that they were conducting indiscriminate stops, but the supreme court lifted that order in September.
