Federal Judge Bars Ethnicity-Based Immigration Stops Across Seven Southern California Counties

A federal judge has ordered immigration agents across Southern California to stop detaining people because they look Latino and working class. The Trump administration is already fighting it.

U.S. District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong issued the preliminary injunction on Friday, Oct. 23, in Vasquez Perdomo v. Mullin. The order was largely sealed until Thursday, Oct. 29. The government filed its notice of appeal to the Ninth Circuit on Wednesday, Oct. 28.

What the order requires

The injunction covers the Central District of California: Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara and Ventura counties. Stops at ports of entry, checkpoints and other functional equivalents of the border are exempt.

Agents must have individualized reasonable suspicion that a person has violated immigration law before detaining them. The order says officers "must consider the totality of circumstances and may not rely solely on apparent status as low-income or working-class and Latino, even when an identified target is allegedly low-income or working-class and Latino."

The last clause is the operative limit. Matching the general look of a suspect is not enough on its own.

The judge's findings

Frimpong found that the plaintiffs are likely to prove the practice violates the Fourth Amendment's protection against unreasonable seizures and the Fifth Amendment's equal protection guarantee. The 84-page order concludes the government likely maintains "an unwritten policy, practice, and pattern of detaining individuals because they appeared to be Latino or Latino and working class."

She leaned on what she called "a mountain of evidence." That included body-camera footage, text messages and video from a June 2025 operation at a Home Depot in Hollywood.

In one video, an agent says: "Yeah, just plug us in wherever you see some tonks and we'll jump out." In another, an agent says of a man in a minivan: "I'm pretty sure he's wet." The plaintiffs' complaint says "tonks" is a derogatory term tied to the sound of a flashlight striking a migrant's head, and that "wet" is short for "wetback," a slur aimed at Mexican and other Latino immigrants.

The court also heard from Latino U.S. citizens whose claims of citizenship were ignored. One car wash worker said an agent would not let him get his passport. Other accounts described Latino workers being detained while white people nearby were left alone.

On the government's argument that agents are trained to follow the law, Frimpong wrote: "The Government's showing that it trains agents to follow the law cannot defeat the mountain of evidence that, in practice, agents do not follow the law."

She also wrote that the ruling is preliminary and not a final determination that the government maintains an unlawful policy.

The government's response

The Justice Department wants the order stayed while the appeal proceeds. August Flentje, a senior Justice Department lawyer, wrote in the stay application that the injunction "gravely hinders the government's ability to conduct immigration stops."

Without a stay, he wrote, the order would "inflict irreparable harm on multiple federal agencies and the public interest" and create "an untenable situation in which a federal court micromanages every operation and stop conducted in a District of 20 million people."

The Department of Homeland Security has said throughout the case that its agents operate within the law. Its statement: "Our agents are focused on protecting the American people, not entertaining performative outrage." It added: "Where is the media's outrage for Angel families who lost a loved one to illegal alien crime?"

The department's statement does not address the footage or the slurs.

The plaintiffs

Residents, Latino workers and advocacy groups sued DHS, alleging unconstitutional detentions that they say have been under way since the summer of 2025. The ACLU of Southern California represents them.

Mohammad Tajsar, the ACLU's director of immigrants' rights, said the order "recognizes that the armed goons who targeted and abducted Latino community members in Southern California were in fact simply racially profiling as many people as they could get handcuffs on." He said the group will monitor compliance "to make sure we end this project of racist immigration enforcement once and for all."

Flor Melendrez, executive director of the CLEAN Carwash Worker Center, a plaintiff, said agents have been "showing up at car washes and taking people without a warrant."

The Supreme Court problem

This is not the first round. In September 2025, the Supreme Court suspended an earlier restraining order that barred agents from relying on factors including ethnicity, language, location and type of work when making stops. Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote then that apparent ethnicity can be considered alongside other circumstances in determining reasonable suspicion.

The new order is built on a year of evidence and a narrower rule. It does not ban ethnicity as one factor among many. It bars agents from treating the look of a working-class Latino person as sufficient on its own.

Whether the Ninth Circuit and, if it gets there, the Supreme Court see that line the same way is the open question. Border enforcement and immigration law are legitimate government functions, and so is the rule that every stop needs a reason that applies to the person actually stopped. The judge found the evidence shows agents were not meeting that standard. The government disputes that its agents are breaking the law.

The next concrete step is the Ninth Circuit's ruling on the Justice Department's stay application. Until it rules, the injunction stays in effect.