The ACLU and United Farm Workers have filed a motion alleging that the Border Patrol violated a court order intended to curb racial profiling and unlawful, warrantless arrests in the Central Valley.
They want the judge to require new training and forbid agents involved in a July raid in Sacramento from participating in other operations until they are retrained.
In April, a federal district court judge ruled that the Border Patrol likely violated the Constitution’s protections against unreasonable search and seizure during a January operation in Kern County called “Operation Return to Sender,” in which agents swarmed a Home Depot and Latino market, among other areas frequented by laborers. The judge ordered the Border Patrol, led by El Centro Sector Chief Gregory Bovino, to stop the raids in California’s Eastern District, which covers much of the state’s Central Valley, including Sacramento.
The Home Depot on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles was the scene of an immigration raid in June.
(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)
Bovino in June took his agents to Los Angeles, where they spent weeks aggressively pursuing Latino-looking workers outside of Home Depots, car washes, bus stops and other areas. The agents often wore masks and used unmarked vehicles.
After a federal district court judge temporarily barred agents from conducting raids in the Los Angeles area, Bovino briefly moved north to Sacramento in July, detaining Latino day laborers in a Home Depot parking lot.
In an interview near the parking lot with Fox News, Bovino indicated at the time that his operations were ramping up, not slowing down. “There is no sanctuary anywhere,” Bovino said.
“We’re here to stay. We’re not going anywhere. We’re going to affect this mission and secure the homeland.”
Bovino told Fox the raids were targeted and based on intel.
“Everything we do is targeted,” he said. “We did have prior intelligence that there were targets that we were interested in and around that Home Depot, as well as other targeted enforcement packages in and around the Sacramento area.”
In a motion filed last week, the ACLU and the United Farm Workers asked the federal district court to enforce the preliminary injunction issued in April that barred Border Patrol agents from stopping people without reasonable suspicion and from making warrantless arrests without assessing flight risk.
If granted, the motion could potentially bar Bovino from planning or participating in new raids in the Eastern District. Bovino appears to be moving on regardless: He announced Tuesday on his social media account that the L.A. crackdown would be expanding to other cities across the country.
A Border Patrol spokesman did not return a request for comment about the ACLU and UFW’s motion.
If the plaintiffs in the Kern County case are successful in getting a judge to strengthen or enforce the original injunction, the case could have nationwide implications, providing a legal strategy that could be replicated in communities where agents are using similar tactics. In Los Angeles and Southern California, agents have continued high-profile raids and violent tactics, despite a similar but separate temporary restraining order in the Central District, barring similar activity there.
As part of the original preliminary injunction, Border Patrol agents were required to provide the ACLU with documentation on their specific and individual reasonable suspicion for each warrantless stop.
The plaintiffs allege agents fabricated and copied and pasted boilerplate language for those reports from the raid at the Home Depot in south Sacramento.
According to the filing, dozens of armed and masked agents from the Border Patrol, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other federal agencies corralled people in the parking lot in Sacramento, ordering them not to move while demanding to see their papers.
Witnesses described unmarked Chevy trucks, agents dressed “like soldiers,” and people being grabbed and handcuffed with no explanation. At least one U.S. citizen was chased and detained during the operation, but Border Patrol won’t release that arrest report to the ACLU because the agency said it was unrelated to an immigration violation, according to the court documents. The agency told the media that the man slashed one of their tires in the parking lot.
Student detained near Home Depot sweep
Agents also tackled and arrested an 18-year-old high school student who happened to be walking to a nearby Ross, according to the ACLU and UFW’s motion.
Selvin Osbeli Mejia Diaz, a senior at Valley High School, fled violence in Central America last year and came to the United States as an unaccompanied minor. He lives with his aunt in Sacramento and is complying with the orders in his immigration court case seeking asylum, according to the ACLU and UFW motion.
According to his declaration, he was walking to the store to buy a shirt when an unmarked Chevy pulled up behind him. A masked agent burst out from the vehicle, tackled him to the ground, and handcuffed him without asking any questions, according to Mejia Diaz’s declaration.
“Everything happened very fast, and I felt very afraid because I did not know who the man was,” Mejia Diaz wrote in his declaration. “He was much taller than me and he used a lot of force, and he immediately handcuffed me while I was on the ground … I think they saw me and figured they could arrest me because I looked Latino.”
Mejia Diaz was born in Guatemala and turned himself in to border agents in June 2024 after crossing the U.S. border. After the Home Depot raid, he was taken to a detention center in downtown Sacramento, where he had to sleep on a hard ceramic floor with an aluminum blanket. He said he was detained for several days before he was allowed to call his aunt for a couple of minutes.
He is still being detained in the Imperial Regional Detention Facility.
The Border Patrol’s arrest report for Mejia Diaz incorrectly states he was in the Home Depot parking lot, the ACLU alleges, which they say supports their assertion that agents are using “copy and pasted” language for each arrest report.
Residents surround ICE and Border Patrol agents after an immigrant raid in the city of Bell on June 20.
(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)
How the Border Patrol justified arrests
The ACLU also says that Border Patrol’s official documentation of the raid, required by the court order, is riddled with other factual errors and boilerplate language.
The forms, known as Form I-213s, are meant to document agents’ reasonable suspicions for each warrantless stop they make. During discovery, Border Patrol gave the ACLU 11 such arrest reports for the Sacramento raid. Three of them included “X” placeholders instead of specific information about locations or names or details for the arrests.
Nearly every report used identical language, claiming people “fled from agents” as a factor in the agents’ reasonable suspicion. Several witnesses told the ACLU some people did not run, according to the motion. The plaintiffs also argue that running from masked, armed men who do not identify themselves should not be enough for reasonable suspicion.
A handful of the reports justified the warrantless arrests by stating: “Sacramento, California has been identified as a city where many illegal aliens are known to stay, live and work without having any legal documentation in the United States.” Others noted that California is a sanctuary state.
“(Person) was located in California, which is a sanctuary state. Sanctuary states shield the identity of illegal aliens from immigration officials,” the arrest reports noted. The plaintiffs argue that someone being in a sanctuary state is not enough cause to give an agent reasonable suspicion that they are in the country illegally.
California’s sanctuary law curbs local law enforcement cooperation with immigration authorities and prevents the automatic transfer of people to federal immigration custody, except for people who have been convicted of serious or violent felonies.
Border Patrol would not provide reports for individuals who were detained but then released, the motion states. The ACLU is asking the judge to shorten the amount of time Border Patrol has to share the arrest reports from seven days to four days because many of the people detained in the Sacramento raid had already been deported by the time they got the arrest reports, according to their motion.
A hearing on the motion to enforce the injunction is set for October in Fresno.
Fry and Olmos write for Cal Matters, where this article originally appeared.
This story originally appeared on LA Times
