A federal judge in Los Angeles granted an immigration stops injunction on Oct. 23 that bars detention stops based on racial stereotyping across seven Southern California counties, the ACLU of Southern California announced on Oct. 29.
U.S. District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong wrote the order in Vasquez Perdomo v. Mullin, No. 2:25-cv-05605, and it leans heavily on the agents’ own deposition testimony, text messages and body-camera video, alongside at least 45 declarations from people who were detained. The order is a preliminary injunction, and it says it is not a final decision.
What the Order Prohibits in Southern California
The injunction covers the Central District of California: Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara and Ventura counties. It bars detention stops based on racial stereotyping, except at a port of entry, a checkpoint or the functional equivalent of the border.
Agents building reasonable suspicion must weigh the totality of the circumstances, the ACLU said, and the court partly certified a class of people affected by the practice. Mohammad Tajsar, director of immigrants’ rights at the ACLU Foundation of Southern California, said, “we will now closely monitor compliance with this court order.”
What the Court Found about Apparent Race and “Day Laborer” Stops
The court found the plaintiffs likely to prove that the government has a policy of stopping people for immigration purposes “just because they look Latino or because they look Latino and working class.” It held that apparent Latino race, alone or paired with working-class status, does not amount to reasonable suspicion, which must be particular to the person stopped under the Fourth Amendment.
The order took apart the label “day laborer.” Officers had no consistent definition of it, the court found, and it worked as shorthand for working-class Latino people. Some of the people detained wore ordinary clothing, and one wore the uniform of a high-end market. The court also wrote that racial slurs heard on body-worn camera footage were not consistent with a race-neutral analysis.
The Evidence and the Government’s Arguments
The record included deposition testimony from several agents and text messages that supported what the court described as a “see bodies, chase bodies” approach. Operational directives from May 2025 encouraged agents to arrest people who were not named targets, the order says.
The government argued the injunction was precluded, too universal, vague and overbroad. The court rejected most of those arguments and narrowed some of the plaintiffs’ proposed language. The government also cited three encounters it called consensual, and the court found that none showed a consensual stop. It did not accept the argument that an armed officer alone does not make a seizure, in an encounter where a man was told not to leave.
The court found much of the plaintiffs’ evidence uncontroverted because the government supplied no reasonable-suspicion analyses for the people who gave declarations, and it found neither a bond nor a stay warranted. The order calls itself a preliminary ruling, and the ACLU said it will monitor compliance.
