The Justice Department has asked a federal judge in Los Angeles to rule by 5 p.m. Pacific time on Monday, Nov. 2, on whether to pause her order barring immigration agents from stopping people across Southern California based on racial stereotyping. The government says it will go to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals after that deadline. The order covers seven counties and about 20 million people, and it is the second time this case has reached that stage.
U.S. District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong issued the preliminary injunction in Vasquez Perdomo v. Mullin under seal on Friday, Oct. 23, and filed a public version with one redaction. She found the plaintiffs likely to prove that federal agents in the Los Angeles area follow an unwritten policy of stopping people "just because they look Latino or because they look Latino and working class." She also wrote that the order "is not a final decision on whether the Government is, in fact, following an unlawful policy."
The government filed a notice of appeal and an emergency stay application on Oct. 28. The plaintiffs opposed it on Oct. 29, and the cities and Los Angeles County that joined the case as intervenors filed their own opposition on Oct. 30. As of Sunday morning, we found no ruling on the stay request on the public court docket or in news reports. NPR's Weekend Edition Sunday covered the order on Nov. 1.
What the injunction says
The operative part of the order is two paragraphs long. Outside ports of entry, checkpoints and other "functional equivalents" of the border, the Department of Homeland Security and its agencies may not enforce "their policy and practice of conducting detentive stops in this District based on racial stereotyping, rather than a pre-stop individualized, particularized assessment of reasonable suspicion."
The second paragraph explains how agents must reach that suspicion. They "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." In other words, a description of a wanted person as a Latino day laborer does not by itself justify stopping every Latino day laborer on a corner.
The order applies across the Central District of California, which covers Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, Ventura, Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties, according to the ACLU of Southern California, which represents some of the plaintiffs.
Frimpong declined several things the parties asked for. She did not require agents to document and report every stop. She required no bond from the plaintiffs, writing that the government offered "no evidence upon which it could award any nonzero bond amount." She also refused the government's request to hold the order for 14 days so it could seek a stay on appeal.
In a separate order, she certified two classes. One covers people stopped since June 6, 2025, or who will be stopped, without individualized suspicion and based on apparent status as low-income or working-class and Latino. The other covers people in the district stopped since the same date at least in part because of their apparent Latino race, color or ethnicity.
The evidence the judge relied on
The 84-page order opens with quotations from the record. Among them are text messages in which agents used the slur "tonk," and testimony that Border Patrol teams "only know one way to operate . . . See bodies, chase bodies." The Los Angeles Times reported that the evidence included body-camera footage from a June 2025 raid at a Hollywood Home Depot, in which an agent said of a man in a minivan, "I'm pretty sure he's wet."
The judge described the government's shift in 2025 away from operations built around pre-identified targets. She cited internal instructions to increase "collateral" arrests, meaning arrests of people who were not the target of an operation. She found that in operations labeled "targeted," officers frequently did not know whether the listed targets were arrested, and she described roving patrols with no pre-identified targets. During one roving patrol on June 18, 2025, according to deposition testimony she cited, officers chose to raid a Whittier car wash after "Googl[ing] a list of nearest car washes."
On that record, 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 concluded the plaintiffs were likely to win their claims under the Fourth Amendment, which bars unreasonable seizures, and the equal-protection guarantee of the Fifth Amendment.
These are findings at the preliminary-injunction stage. The judge weighed a record built through discovery, but there has been no trial, and the government disputes both the existence of the policy and how the evidence should be read.
Why the Supreme Court's 2025 order matters
This is the second time Frimpong has restricted stops in this case. In July 2025 she issued a temporary restraining order barring stops based only on four factors, alone or combined: apparent race or ethnicity, speaking Spanish or accented English, the type of location, and the type of work a person appeared to do.
On Sept. 8, 2025, the Supreme Court stayed that order without a majority opinion. Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote a concurrence. He said reasonable suspicion is a lower bar than probable cause and depends on the totality of the circumstances. He wrote that "apparent ethnicity alone cannot furnish reasonable suspicion," but that it "can be a 'relevant factor' when considered along with other salient factors." He also wrote that the plaintiffs had little basis to expect they would be stopped again. Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. She wrote, "We should not have to live in a country where the Government can seize anyone who looks Latino, speaks Spanish, and appears to work a low wage job."
The new order addresses that history directly. Frimpong wrote that the current request "materially differs" from the 2025 order in the relief sought, the evidence and the legal theories. Because the stay came without an opinion of the Court, she wrote, Kavanaugh's concurrence is not binding, and "This Court cannot be faulted for failing to follow guidance that was never given."
The government's stay application reads the 2025 order the other way. It calls the new injunction "materially analogous" to the one the justices stayed. It cites the Court's statement in Trump v. Boyle (2025) that interim orders "inform how a court should exercise its equitable discretion in like cases."
The government's case for a stay
The Justice Department's application makes five main arguments.
Standing. The government says the individual plaintiffs and the three advocacy groups cannot show a "certainly impending" future unlawful stop, so they lack standing to seek forward-looking relief. It cites figures from earlier in the case: the Los Angeles field office covers about 20 million people, of whom the government estimates about 2 million are in the country illegally, and officers made 2,805 arrests from June to mid-July 2025. That, it argues, makes a repeat stop of any given plaintiff speculative. It also cites an Aug. 24, 2026, 9th Circuit decision in United Farmworkers of America v. Mullin that lifted a similar injunction on standing grounds.
No unwritten policy. The filing says agents follow written policies that forbid relying on race alone and prohibit slurs. It describes the plaintiffs' evidence as "a smattering of individual arrests, a few comments by a handful of officers." It argues that agents may weigh "apparent ethnicity and perceived occupation (but not apparent ethnicity alone)" with other factors, consistent with Kavanaugh's concurrence.
Vagueness. The government says the order does not define "low-income or working-class status," leaving officers "to guess at the boundaries of permissible conduct." It also calls the order an improper "follow-the-law injunction."
Scope. Citing Trump v. CASA (2025), which limited universal injunctions, the filing argues that district-wide relief protects people who are not parties or class members.
Harm. The application says the order "gravely hinders the government's ability to conduct immigration stops" and creates "an untenable situation in which a federal court micromanages every operation and stop conducted in a District of 20 million people." It also asks the court to freeze the rest of the case while the appeal proceeds.
A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson told the Los Angeles Times that the ruling "is nothing but another Biden-appointed judge attempting to obstruct President Trump from fulfilling the American people's mandate for mass deportations of illegal aliens." That statement criticizes the judge rather than making a legal argument; the department's court filings we reviewed do not contain it. [Funding: campaign funding data not verified]
The plaintiffs' and cities' case against a stay
The plaintiffs' opposition opens with the account of a man identified as H.S.H. It says a plainclothes ICE officer pulled him over on Feb. 15, 2026, while he drove his son to soccer practice, told him "I could kill you if I wanted to," and said he stopped him because he "look[s] like a paisa." The filing calls that evidence undisputed.
Clarity. The plaintiffs say the government's vagueness argument "borders on the absurd." In their reading, the order "bars Defendants' reliance on an apparent demographic profile as a substitute for reasonable suspicion" and does not require agents to determine anyone's actual ethnicity or income.
Harm. They argue that "the government is not harmed by following the Constitution." They add that the government's claimed harms come from a reading of the order the plaintiffs say is mistaken.
The rest of the case. They oppose freezing discovery. The injunction covers only stops, while the suit also raises claims about access to counsel and detention conditions. They note they have survived two motions to dismiss, certified two classes and obtained three preliminary injunction orders.
Procedure. They argue the government skipped the requirements for emergency (ex parte) relief, which must show irreparable prejudice if a motion is heard on the normal schedule.
The intervenors' filing, signed by lawyers for the City of Los Angeles, more than a dozen other cities including Long Beach, Santa Ana and Pomona, and Los Angeles County, focuses on the public interest. They argue that the stops have disrupted local services, courts and public health work, and that safety regulation is "primarily, and historically, a matter of local concern." According to SignalData's summary of the docket, 21 cities and Los Angeles County joined the motion that produced the injunction.
Weighing the arguments
Each side has a strong point and a weaker one.
The government's standing argument has real support. The Supreme Court stayed the earlier order, and Kavanaugh's concurrence questioned whether these plaintiffs face a real risk of future stops. The 9th Circuit's August decision in a similar case points the same way. Against that, Frimpong certified classes covering everyone stopped on the challenged basis, which changes the question from whether one named plaintiff will be stopped again to whether a class faces the practice. How the appeals court treats class certification will likely matter as much as the standing precedents.
The government's description of the evidence as isolated incidents is harder to check. The judge found the opposite after reviewing depositions, internal messages and body-camera footage. The government is entitled to argue that she weighed the evidence wrongly, but the appeals court will generally defer to a trial judge's factual findings unless they are clearly erroneous.
On the plaintiffs' side, quotations such as the ACLU's description of agents as "armed goons" are advocacy, not findings. The court found a likely policy; it did not find that every stop in the district was unlawful, and the order expressly leaves final judgment for later. The plaintiffs' claim that the order is easy to follow also has limits. The order leaves "working-class" undefined, though the class-certification order says the term includes people who appear low-income.
One argument on each side leans on a weak inference. The DHS statement attacks the judge's appointing president rather than her reasoning, which is an ad hominem argument: who appointed a judge does not show whether her findings are right. On the other side, the claim that the government "is not harmed by following the Constitution" assumes the conclusion in dispute, since the government's position is that its stops already comply.
Deadlines and the appeal path
- Monday, Nov. 2, 5 p.m. PT: The government's requested deadline for a district-court ruling on the stay. It has said it will seek relief from the 9th Circuit after that.
- The 9th Circuit: A motions panel would decide whether to pause the order while the appeal is heard. Either side could then ask the Supreme Court to step in, as the government did in 2025.
- The rest of the case: If no stay of proceedings is granted, discovery continues on the plaintiffs' other claims, including access to counsel for detained people.
The case is one of several legal fights over immigration enforcement and federal power that 567 Politics has covered this week. Our earlier reports include the Maryland order restoring asylum-interview notice for unaccompanied children, the 9th Circuit's ruling in the diversity visa lottery dispute and the Big Bend border wall case now fully briefed at the Supreme Court. Our United States issues guide tracks where politicians stand on legal immigration and asylum access.
Funding note
President Donald Trump [Funding: campaign funding data not verified] is not a named defendant, but the enforcement operations at issue are carried out by agencies in his administration. 567 Politics checked its funding records for Trump on Nov. 1 and has no verified FEC snapshot on file for his profile, so this story includes no campaign finance figures. Missing data should not be read as zero. The named defendants, including Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, are sued in their official capacities; we have no 567 Politics profile for Mullin. Our methodology explains how we handle contested claims.