A federal judge has found the Department of Homeland Security in contempt of court, accusing the agency of dragging its feet on an order to preserve digital records from the personal cell phones of immigration agents involved in last year’s controversial enforcement sweeps across the Los Angeles area.
U.S. District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong, who presides in the Central District of California, had already ordered federal officials back in January to speed up the process of copying data from personal phones belonging to more than 800 agents connected to the 2025 immigration raids in Los Angeles. This week, Frimpong went further, slapping the government with a $500-per-day fine until it complies with the original order to hand over the devices for evidence review — and requiring the federal government to cover legal costs that plaintiffs’ attorneys racked up trying to obtain the records in the first place.
The contempt finding follows an admission in June, when DHS attorneys told the court that the agency simply hadn’t turned over the records. According to those attorneys, government-issued phones were being processed at a pace of roughly three devices every two weeks — a timeline that, plaintiffs’ lawyers noted, would take nearly four years to complete at that rate.
Attorneys representing immigrants swept up in Operation At Large, the name given to the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration crackdown in Los Angeles last year, say the phones could hold evidence supporting claims that federal agents engaged in a pattern of racial profiling during the operation.
Back in May, lawyers with the American Civil Liberties Union wrote that DHS had “simply proceeded to thwart” Frimpong’s order, both by slow-walking the imaging of government-issued phones and by openly resisting the directive as it applied to agents’ personal devices.
Last month, ACLU attorneys asked Frimpong to issue a separate order explicitly barring agents from detaining people based on their race or ethnicity. In their filing, they pointed to text messages and body-camera footage showing agents using slurs — including “wetback” and “tonks” — to describe working-class Latino residents they intended to detain, according to court records.
“Federal agents aren’t just violating the Constitution out on the streets — the government is also violating court orders by deliberately withholding critical evidence about its immigration enforcement operations,” said Mayra Joachin, an attorney with the ACLU of Southern California.
DHS has not responded to inquiries about whether agents’ use of the term “tonks” violated agency policy.
Following Frimpong’s contempt ruling, DHS issued a written statement identical to one it released just last week in response to another development in the case.
“Our agents are focused on protecting the American people, not manufacturing outrage,” the statement read. “Where is the media outrage for the families who lost a loved one to a crime committed by an illegal alien?”
Original source: CalMatters
