A federal judge has ruled that immigration agents operating in Los Angeles likely broke the law by detaining people without warrants before determining whether they posed any real flight risk — a decision that advocates are calling a major check on the aggressive enforcement tactics that swept through the region last year.
The ruling, made public this week, stems from body-camera footage, sworn statements and internal text messages gathered during litigation over immigration sweeps that rattled Los Angeles neighborhoods in the summer of 2025. U.S. District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong upheld an earlier preliminary order finding that Border Patrol and ICE agents cannot simply take someone into custody — even someone suspected of being in the country illegally — without first assessing whether that person is likely to flee before a warrant could be obtained.
“This court finds sufficient evidence that defendants have a continuing policy and practice of making warrantless arrests in violation of the requirement to conduct a flight-risk analysis,” Frimpong wrote.
Federal law allows immigration officers to make warrantless arrests only when they have reasonable grounds to believe a person is in the country unlawfully and is likely to escape before a warrant can be secured. Attorneys representing immigrant rights groups argued that agents routinely skipped that step altogether, instead detaining people first and sorting out their legal status later.
“This ruling is one of the most significant decisions to date in the community’s fight to end the federal government’s cruel and unlawful practice of snatching people off the street and tearing families apart,” said Mayra Joachin, senior staff attorney with the ACLU Foundation of Southern California.
The Department of Homeland Security defended its agents’ conduct, saying in a statement that ICE has legal authority to make arrests under federal statute, using “reasonable suspicion” to investigate immigration status and probable cause to justify detentions in line with the Fourth Amendment. The agency noted that the U.S. Supreme Court has previously sided with it on similar enforcement questions.
The case grew out of a lawsuit filed last year by the ACLU and a coalition of advocacy organizations against the Department of Homeland Security, following a series of high-profile raids across Los Angeles led by former Border Patrol official Gregory Bovino. DHS attorneys have said those specific operations ended in February, but the broader deportation push under President Donald Trump has only accelerated since then. Nationally, arrests hit their highest point of Trump’s second term in July, with nearly 50,000 detentions recorded, according to the Deportation Data Project. In California, arrests were up more than 15% compared with the same period a year earlier.
One case at the center of the ruling involved a man identified in court records only by his initials, AT, who was detained outside a car wash in Los Angeles on a scorching August day. Body-camera footage shows a Border Patrol agent running up behind him as he stood near a Mazda with a rag and spray bottle in hand. Within seconds, the agent grabbed him by the collar of his Handy J Car Wash shirt.
“Hey, sir, let’s go,” the agent said in Spanish. Confused, the man asked where they were going and told the agent he had documentation. He was handcuffed within ten seconds and driven away in an unmarked Dodge Charger to an ICE processing facility, leaving his cleaning supplies behind on the hood of the car. He was fingerprinted and released later that day once officials realized he was a lawful permanent resident.
The arresting agent’s report claimed AT made “a couple of quick movements” suggesting he might flee — a claim not supported by the body-camera video. The agent also wrote that when asked about his citizenship, AT answered “United States” but appeared “confused and unsure of his answer, similar to people I have arrested previously.” Court records show the agent never attempted to check identification or ask basic background questions before handcuffing him — the kind of assessment federal law requires before a warrantless arrest can be made.
At the same car wash that day, another worker was detained by a different agent. That agent’s report noted the man had complied with instructions, yet later justified the arrest by claiming the man had “disobeyed the agent’s orders” — a contradiction that judges and attorneys pointed to as evidence of the pattern advocates have described. In legal filings, attorneys said roughly 80% of the arrest reports they reviewed either lacked any real flight-risk analysis or relied on boilerplate language that didn’t match the footage.
Frimpong specifically cited that car wash arrest in her ruling, noting stark differences between the government’s written justification and what the video actually showed. She wrote that although agents claimed the worker, identified as EGG, was likely to flee based on alleged “flight from law enforcement,” the footage showed him standing in the same spot throughout the encounter, working, until an agent called him over. “Contrary to the government’s written flight-risk analysis,” the judge wrote, “he did not flee.”
In that same recording, a supervising agent tells the worker, “We’re going to take you in and check that everything is fine. If everything checks out, we’ll let you go” — a comment attorneys say reveals how these operations actually functioned: arrest first, verify later.
Other footage submitted in the case appears to show agents disregarding earlier immigration court decisions altogether. In one clip from September, an agent asks a colleague whether they are still detaining people who already have scheduled immigration court hearings — a circumstance that typically signals a person has already been screened and found not to be a flight risk. Another agent responds, “I don’t care if you have a court date coming up, you’re a custody redetermination case,” indicating that agents were overriding prior judicial findings.
Attorneys representing the detained workers argued that even individuals already moving through the immigration court system, previously released on the presumption that they weren’t flight risks, were being swept up again. Agency policy requires Border Patrol officers to ask about identification, address and other flight-risk indicators before making an arrest, but plaintiffs say body-camera footage repeatedly shows agents skipping that step.
In one August 2025 raid captured on video, Border Patrol agents jumped out of a Penske rental truck to detain people in a Home Depot parking lot in Los Angeles. According to court records, an agent arrested a man identified as Tijerino-Garmendia after writing in his report that the man “stated he did not have any identification indicating his identity or address.” Footage reviewed by attorneys shows the agent never actually asked him those questions.
Similar rulings barring warrantless arrests have been issued by federal judges in Oregon, Colorado and Washington, D.C., though in at least two of those cases, courts later found that agents continued the practice despite the orders.
In the Los Angeles case, Frimpong directed agents to document the “specific and particularized facts” supporting probable cause that a person was likely to flee before a warrant could be obtained. She declined, however, to require agents to document community ties — such as employment, housing or family connections — when flight risk could be shown through other means. She also declined to require documentation of encounters where agents speak with someone but do not make an arrest.
The federal government asked for a two-week delay before the order took effect while it considered an appeal. Frimpong denied that request, stating that the government could not reasonably claim harm from being ordered simply to follow the law.
Original source: CalMatters
