The warrantless arrests have been a key feature of the government’s mass deportation efforts
by Wendy Fry and Sergio Olmos
CalMatters
A judge on Thursday indicated that she’s inclined to order federal immigration agents to stop arresting people without warrants in Los Angeles if they haven’t assessed their flight risk.
If she grants the order, it would be one of the most significant so far in a wide-ranging lawsuit over the government’s ongoing immigration raids in Southern California. It would force agents to fundamentally change the way they’ve conducted the sweeps at the heart of President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign.
Since 1946, federal law has allowed immigration officers to arrest someone without a warrant only when they have probable cause both that the person is in the country unlawfully and that they are likely to escape before a warrant can be obtained. Courts have long held that to mean that agents are required to consider the person’s ties to the community, like a person having a job, a home and a family in the community where the arrest occurs.
However, in raids in Southern California and across the country, supervisors have told agents to “get out and start grabbing people,” and agents have ambushed people without knowing their immigration history and targeted Latinos at places like car washes and bus stops, court records and body camera footage show.
Last month, plaintiffs attorneys in the lawsuit filed with the court text messages and body cam footage that showed federal agents using racial slurs to identify targets in the Los Angeles raids. They argued the evidence showed immigration agents simply detained people who looked Latino.
U.S. District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong’s tentative ruling Thursday means agents would need to obtain “individualized, pre-arrest probable cause determinations of flight risk” in the city and the areas surrounding Los Angeles, home to 19 million people.
That means people who have longstanding ties to the community, U.S.-born children and spouses and long-term homes in the Los Angeles area would not likely be considered by a court to be a flight risk, unless they have serious criminal records.
If her ruling is finalized, Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong would become at least the fifth federal judge across the country to block the administration’s warrantless arrest practices, following courts in Oregon, Colorado and Washington D.C. Two courts have also already ruled agents continued the practice of warrantless arrests even after being ordered to stop.
In July 2025, weeks after the sweeps first began, Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong issued an order barring agents from stopping people based on factors like their apparent race, speaking Spanish or wearing certain clothing. The Supreme Court eventually put that order on hold. Thursday’s order is distinct in that it doesn’t address who agents may stop for questioning, but what info they must collect before deciding to arrest the person without a warrant.
The ruling comes after a motion brought by attorneys for immigrants caught up in the LA raids, which began with high-profile raids under former Border Patrol leader Gregory Bovino and have continued, with lesser public attention, into 2026.
Attorneys with the American Civil Liberties Union and Public Counsel, among others, analyzed 113 arrest narratives produced as discovery in the case, finding nearly 80% contained either no escape-risk assessment or used boiler plate language.
In those narratives, some agents wrote that they determined a person was likely to escape because they either allegedly ran from law enforcement officers, lived in a sanctuary state, ignored commands or just based on the person’s “illegal presence in the United States.”
In several instances, the government’s own body camera footage contradicted the arrest paperwork. For example, an agent wrote a man was “running in the opposite direction” during a warehouse raid in Pomona, but body camera footage shows the man was not running and had very limited mobility, court records say.
In another example, court records show an agent wrote a man was “running away” from him during an August 2025 raid at a Westlake Home Depot. Video shows the man was walking toward the agent while texting.
In depositions, federal officials defended warrantless arrests. The Border Patrol supervisor who oversaw the arrests of three men taken from a Pasadena bus stop testified that if a person makes a “self-admission of alienage,” that’s enough to justify a warrantless arrest.
Just walking his dogs
As part of the motion, attorneys for immigrants swept up in the raids released hundreds of new exhibits including body camera footage from agents, text messages and official orders from ICE headquarters.
In one previously unreleased body camera video, a swarm of federal agents move through a parking lot and stop a man with two small barking dogs.
A woman tries to explain to an immigration agent that the man they’ve detained does have papers, he just didn’t bring them with him. “Salió a caminar sus perros,” she says, telling them that he’d just went out to walk his dogs. The agent says he doesn’t understand – “No entiendo.” “It’s the law, ma’am,” another says, telling her she is welcome to file a complaint with the U.S. Border Patrol.
At no point in the video do agents ask the man anything about where he lives, where he works or whether he has family here, the kinds of questions courts have said agents must weigh before arresting someone without a warrant.
Citing newly released evidence, plaintiffs attorneys argued that immigration officials are also creating poor conditions in detention to force people to voluntarily deport themselves.
A man identified in a declaration only as D.V.V. said while he was detained at Adelanto ICE Processing Center in San Bernardino County he was pressured multiple times to sign a form he didn’t understand.
“I asked to see the form. The second time, the officers took me to a meeting room where a man told me they would force me to sign if I refused to sign,” D.V.V. wrote in his declaration, submitted under penalty of perjury with the court.
“When I refused, they brought in a bigger man who said he would force me to sign. It seemed like they were trying to intimidate me,” he said.
One of the exhibits points to damage that can’t be undone. In a declaration, a tamale vendor who has been in the United States for more than 30 years describes the long-lasting impacts of being detained for five months in Adelanto.
“I want to be strong and move on, but I am struggling. I feel incredible sadness. I am not the same man I was before I was detained. I feel like a stranger to myself. Sometimes I cannot hold in all my emotions and I just cry for a long time. At night, I can’t sleep,” he wrote.
