LATINOPIA GUEST BLOG 7.25.25 BOBBI MURRAY THE JUDICIAL BENCH STRIKES BACK

The Judicial Bench Strikes Back

It’s not news that ICE troops have been very busy chasing down and sweeping up brown-skinned people at Home Depot, restaurants and carwashes. Pause for a minute to learn about a deaf and mute car wash worker and DACA recipient in Southern California who was picked up by ICE at work and sent to El Paso. He communicates by sign language, which apparently no one involved in his incarceration process has mastered. The authorities in El Paso gave him paperwork in Spanish, which he doesn’t read or write.

ICE and the National Guard also bravely faced off in early July with some kids and teachers at MacArthur Park—in a heavily immigrant neighborhood a couple of miles west of downtown Los Angeles. A pretty place, with a little lake and grass that provides a nice respite for a crowded urban neighborhood.

It’s usually it’s loaded with street vendors, soccer players and families, even on a weekday but the 90-some National Guard troops in tactical gear and dozens of federal officers, many on horseback, that showed up on July ?? were apparently anticipated—immigrant advocates had received some substantial tips. Adults whisked the summer camp kids inside.

The operation left empty-handed.

You’ve been keeping up with stories like this about ICE, but it’s worth noting that the MacArthur Park non-skirmish was a win for the community at least—a sort-of-see-something, say-something moment in that moment that reflects how an effective grassroots information network can protect people by being in touch and spreading the word.

Props to the National Day Laborers Organizing Network (NDOLN) and CHIRLA, the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights for having their ground game together so well on this one.

More on these effective grassroots networks in the near future—the pushback they have been organizing has been marvelous and is worth long look—stay tuned to Latinopia when we deep-dive at another time.

But this week on Latinopia we’re here to discuss some master-class effective firing back from the legal and policy resistance trenches at the draconian measures and practices being imposed. Or maybe we should say striking back from the bench.

Big win on July 18^th in Los Angeles, U.S. District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong handed down two temporary restraining orders that block immigration agencies “from conducting detentive stops in this district unless the agent or officer has reasonable suspicion that the person to be stopped is within the United States in violation of U.S. immigration law.”

That order also demands probable cause for picking people up—no targeting car washes, bus stops or Home Depots or produce fields for raids just because of the location and/or the people there are brown and/or speak with an accent. It’s hands-off “unless the agent or officer has reasonable suspicion that the person to be stopped is within the United States in violation of U.S. immigration law.”

The judge’s district covers Los Angeles, Riverside, San Bernardino, Orange, Ventura, Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties. That is a lot of territory with a lot of people who have been under attack by ICE for the past few months. Let’s hope it tamps down the terror in those communities.

A separate order says that those in detention must have access to attorneys or other legal representation seven days a week; access to confidential phone calls with lawyers at no charge to the detainee and that calls are not screened, recorded or monitored.

The Department of Homeland Security issued a statement evincing that they are rip-roaring mad about the whole thing, protesting that “DHS enforcement operations are highly targeted, and officers do their due diligence,” and that “ICE detention facilities have higher standards than most U.S. prisons that hold actual U.S. citizens.”

Both those statements are arguable.

In true Trumpian style, several remarks in the DHS response ended with words IN ALL CAPS: “Claims that individuals have been targeted’ by law enforcement because of their skin color are disgusting and categorically FALSE.”

Frimpong’s ruling was in response to lawsuits from two long-time legal trench warriors, the ACLU  Foundation of Southern California and Public Counsel and joined by a host of other organizations—attorneys Mark Rosenbaum of Public Counsel and Mohammad Tajsar of the ACLU represented in court.

The Trump Administration has filed for a stay of the injunctions pending appeal—we’re waiting to hear when the 9^th Circuit Court of Appeals might consider the issue—so until then the judge’s ruling holds.

A week after Frimpong’s ruling, a couple of other judges showed up again, coming out fighting.

You certainly remember the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia—as you doubtless know, Abrego Garcia, a construction worker who was a resident of the state of Maryland, was wrongly deported and disappeared into a prison in El Salvador known as Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT) that the United States finances with $6 million annually. He held legal protected status in the US.

The Trump Administration later said, after a lot of high-profile pressure, that he was deported because of an administrative error. Abrego Garcia was returned to the US and held in jail in Tennessee on human smuggling charges rooted in a 2022 traffic stop in that state when Abrego Garcia was driving with nine passengers.

The Trump Administration has threatened to take him into custody if he’s released from jail, but U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis of Maryland had a different idea and ordered the US government to restore  the federal supervision Abrego Garcia was under before being wrongfully deported. That status designation had allowed him to live and work in Maryland, where his family lives, as long as he checked in with ICE.

The administration has allowed that should Abrego Garcia be deported, the US would try to send him to a place friendlier than CECOT in El Salvador—maybe Mexico, or South Sudan.

Xinis also ordered three business days’ notice if ICE plans to initiate deportation proceedings.

Garcia’s attorneys had requested Xinis to  order the US government to send him back to Maryland to await trial, and had also asked for the 72-hours notice if ICE planned to deport him.

Meanwhile, another judge who’s not having any of the Administration’s immigration bluster is U.S. District Judge James Boasberg of Washington DC, You may remember him as the judge who ordered that the jet deporting Garcia Abrego return mid-flight to the US because the deportation was in error. That didn’t happen.

Now Boasberg has been busy hearing an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit brought on behalf of alleged Venezuelan gang members removed from the United States under an 18^th century law that’s rarely been used since—well, the 18^th century.

The detainees in the case were returned to Venezuela last week as part of a prisoner exchange, after spending four months in El Salvador’s CECOT prison. ACLU attorney Lee Gelernt told the court his legal team haven’t been able to contact with most of those still incarcerated. They were picked up by ICE under suspicion of being with the Venezuelan gang Tren de Agua. Because of their tattoos—which are not gang tattoos—just the usual thing with sports teams or flowers and names of family members—nothing to do with Tren de Agua.

Judge Boasberg, at a hearing July 24^th  ordered attorneys for the former detainees and the government to submit status reports on whether all the former CECOT detainees have been released from detention in Venezuela.

Boasberg ordered the first status report by Aug. 7, with additional reports every two weeks thereafter.

The legal trench warriors are in there fighting but it’s obvious and has all but been declared aloud that the current Administration is at work to rip the justice system from top to bottom to serve its ends.

No one needs to say it that the justice system hasn’t actually always been just, especially to people of color—sometimes the justice goes right out window—ask falsely incarcerated Black prisoners or World War Two Japanese-Americans locked up in camps.

Still good to see these jurists firing back in these days and times. And, hey! Some wins!

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Copyright 2025 by Bobbi Murray. Home Deport image copyrighted by Barrio Dog Productions Inc. All other images in the public domain.