Los Angeles ICE Raids Racial Profiling Case Moves Forward

The Los Angeles case challenging “roving patrols” of federal immigration officers and ICE detainees’ difficulty contacting attorneys will proceed, a federal judge ruled.

With no sign the federal government will change its enforcement tactics, plaintiffs are likely to keep dealing with unlawful stops, Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong said in a Thursday order in the US District Court for the Central District of California. And access to counsel issues appear to persist at the downtown LA immigration processing center known as B-18, Frimpong said.

She denied the federal government’s motions to dismiss all but one claim of the plaintiffs’ amended complaint. Because three named plaintiffs have been released from detention, Frimpong dismissed a claim seeking their release as moot.

The lawsuit was first brought in July after widespread immigration raids rocked Los Angeles, with agents wearing masks descending on car washes, farms, and Home Depot parking lots to stop and arrest swaths of people. Frimpong’s temporary order barring agents from making arrests based on factors such as ethnicity and occupation was lifted by the US Supreme Court in September.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote that perceived ethnicity can be a “relevant factor” when federal agents make immigration arrests and said US citizens and residents with legal status may be stopped as a result but would be “free to go after the brief encounter.”

Contrary to the federal government’s position, the order was not a decision that “everything they did was lawful,” Frimpong said. And Kavanaugh’s concurrence isn’t binding, nor can its reasoning be attributed to the Supreme Court at large, Frimpong said.

“It is critically important that this Court be very clear about this: The Supreme Court has not issued any decisions saying that what the Government did in Los Angeles—and appears to continue doing—was lawful,” Frimpong said. “The Supreme Court has actually said nothing about what the Government did in Los Angeles. What the Government is saying about the Supreme Court decision is false.”

Frimpong in November ordered officials at B-18 to stop turning away lawyers during regular visiting hours and to provide privacy for conversations between detainees and their counsel. At B-18, which is meant for only temporary stays, detainees are held in cramped quarters with little access to food, water, and medical care, Frimpong noted.

Frimpong on Wednesday also denied the federal government’s motion to dismiss an intervening complaint filed by several cities in the Central District of California, including Los Angeles.

The case is Vasquez Perdomo v. Noem, C.D. Cal., No. 2:25-cv-05605, 2/19/26.