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The Trump administration is backing off a push to rapidly deport three Guatemalan day laborers who were detained 200 miles north of the Mexico border after a federal judge blocked it from fast-tracking their removal.
The administration wanted to deport the men under a new policy that it adapted from one that previously was used nearly exclusively at the border, and only for immigrants who recently arrived in the U.S. Advocates said the case had the potential to signal whether the Trump administration could carry out its promised mass, rapid deportations across California
Judge Dana Sabraw issued a temporary restraining order Friday, prohibiting the government from removing the workers from the Southern District of California after their attorneys argued the agents stopped them without reasonable suspicion, in violation of their Fourth Amendment rights. The men were detained by Border Patrol agents in Pomona.
“There’s no dispute that the Fourth Amendment applies to people within the interior of the United States, is there?” Sabraw asked the attorney for the federal government, who argued the court didn’t have jurisdiction over the workers’ claims and who characterized the stops as consensual.
On Monday, the administration backed down.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Erin Dimbleby said during a court hearing that the men were no longer being processed for rapid removal without a hearing before an immigration judge. She added she was seeking assurances from federal immigration authorities that they would not be placed back in the process called expedited removal.
“No reason was given by the government, but we would guess that the government decided it did not want to produce the arresting Border Patrol agents to testify in court under oath on Thursday to justify the legality of their actions,” said Niels Frenzen, an attorney with the USC Gould School of Law Immigration Clinic who filed a habeas corpus petition on behalf of the workers. Habeas corpus is a constitutional right protecting people from unlawful imprisonment by the government.
The workers have not yet been released from custody, but they will now have a chance to appear before an immigration judge in court, giving them the opportunity to challenge their return to Guatemala and to argue that their due process rights were violated.
This case is similar to a lawsuit filed earlier this year by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of the United Farm Workers about sweeping immigration raids that rattled Kern County in January. In response to the ACLU’s claims that those raids violated farmworkers’ constitutional rights, the Department of Homeland Security said in court papers that it would retrain the Border Patrol agents on how to follow the Fourth Amendment, which governs police searches and arrests.
In that case, the judge barred the El Centro Border Patrol from carrying out warrantless immigration sweeps in areas governed by the federal courts’ Eastern District of California, which spans the Central Valley from Redding to Bakersfield. The district does not include Pomona, where Border Patrol agents arrested the day laborers in a raid on a Home Depot parking lot on April 22.
Detained while looking for work
The agents conducted the Home Depot arrests without warrants, court records show. At least nine people total were taken into custody in the parking lot sweep, the records state.
Jesus Domingo Ros, one of the men detained in Pomona, said in an interview that he was standing on a street corner near the Home Depot when agents appeared from all sides, grabbed him, and threw him to the ground, leaving him with bruises on his shoulder and knee.
“I panicked,” he said in Spanish, describing the instant he realized he was in custody of U.S. immigration authorities. “Just with everything you’re seeing on the news right now, I really panicked because we didn’t know what was going to happen.” He spoke to CalMatters last month at the Imperial Regional Detention Facility in Calexico, where he is now being held.
The 38-year-old Guatemalan said he crossed into the United States without federal authorization nearly three years ago and has been working in construction in Pomona ever since. He said he was looking for work when agents surrounded him. “I’ve never been arrested. I’ve never been detained. This is my first experience,” he said.
Before transferring him to the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, he said the El Centro Border Patrol agents held him and others in freezing cold cells for days while interrogating them about who they might know. The agents hung enlarged mug shots along the walls of their cells, demanding to know the names of the people in the mug shots and whether the workers knew them. “When we said we didn’t know them, they argued with us,” he said.
According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, agents arrested 10 people that day in Pomona and placed them into removal proceedings. No other agencies were involved, said Michael Scappechio, a spokesman for U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Advocates are adamant that more than 20 people were initially taken into custody, based on piecing together the accounts of different witnesses about what happened.
Federal officials defended their actions, saying agents were initially targeting a single individual with an active arrest warrant — a barber who they arrested at gunpoint. During the operation, nine other people were also taken into custody. Some of those detained had prior charges, including child abuse, assault with a deadly weapon, immigration violations, and DUI, said Hilton Beckham, the assistant commissioner for the Border Patrol’s office of public affairs.
At least two other Guatemalans — Yoni Jacinto Garcia and Edwin Juarez-Cobon — detained during the same immigration sweep outside the Home Depot in Pomona were facing the rapid removal process, court records show.
“All three men have been living in the United States for more than two years,” said Alexis Teodoro, Worker Rights Director at the Pomona Economic Opportunity Center.
Domingo Ros said he fled violence and poverty in his hometown, located directly on the border of Guatemala and Chiapas, Mexico. His brother is a legal permanent resident in Pomona, having successfully won an asylum case in the United States, he said.
“Looking for work is not a crime. Waiting for a job opportunity outside a Home Depot isn’t a threat to anyone,” said Teodoro.
Advocates said federal immigration authorities last week told Domingo Ros that he’d be back in Guatemala within days.
That’s because the Trump administration was trying to apply a new policy to his case that expands the powers of immigration officers to fast-track removals of people arrested in the interior of the country.
Trump's push to speed deportations
The process, known as expedited removal, allows immigration officers to remove certain non-citizens from the United States without a hearing before an immigration judge, according to the American Immigration Council. Historically, the process for bypassing immigration courts has been reserved primarily for areas close to the border and for migrants who arrived by sea or crossed the border within the prior two weeks.
The Trump administration released a new expedited removal policy on Jan. 21, allowing immigration officers to apply expedited removals across the entire United States, instead of only near the border and for people who had been in the country longer than two weeks.
“The effect of this change will be to enhance national security and public safety — while reducing government costs — by facilitating prompt immigration determinations,” says the notice of the policy change published online.
Advocates say it’s part of a broader effort to boost deportations by chipping away at the limited due process afforded to immigrants in the United States. The Trump administration has also cancelled grants that funded legal representation for children and for families separated during his first term. It fired dozens of immigration judges in Massachusetts, California, and Louisiana, and removed people to remote locations outside of the United States without a hearing, including to a notorious El Salvadoran high-security prison.
Trump and his supporters argue that using expedited removal will help alleviate the long-overburdened and backlogged immigration court system, which has more than 3.5 million cases pending. The swelling backlog has tripled since 2020, meaning detained migrants are waiting months and even years for their hearings.
"We have thousands of people that are ready to go out, and you can't have a trial for all of these people," Trump said last month from the Oval Office.
The policy places the burden on the person detained to prove that they’ve been in the country continuously for more than two years “to the satisfaction of an immigration officer.” In the past, it’s led to U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents being mistakenly deported.
“It isn’t reasonable to expect someone to carry around 24 months' worth of utility bills on their person at all times. There must be an opportunity, a reasonable opportunity, to provide evidence that they have been in the U.S. for longer than two years, if that is the case,” said Christian Penichet-Paul, the assistant vice president of policy & advocacy, at the National Immigration Forum, an immigrant advocacy non-profit in Washington D.C.
Similar efforts to speed up the process for deportations during Trump’s first administration were challenged in federal court. Initially, a district court granted a preliminary injunction in 2019 blocking the expansion of expedited removal, but this was overturned by the D.C. Circuit, allowing Homeland Security to expand its use of expedited removal while the lawsuit continued.
The legal battle blocked the policy from going into effect until late 2020. The Biden administration then rescinded it in early 2021.
The ACLU is suing again in D.C. District court to try to stop the expanded use of expedited removal. The government has filed a motion to dismiss the suit, claiming the court does not have jurisdiction.
“We think it’s unconstitutional. People who have been in the country clearly have due process rights, and the entire expedited removal process gives people less process than you do when you get a traffic ticket,” said Anand Balakrishnan, senior staff attorney at the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project.
The use of expedited removal to bypass the court system and deport people was rising before Trump was re-elected president. In fiscal year 2013, the numbers peaked when Barack Obama was president, at 193,032 people detained at the border who went through the expedited removal process. That represented 44% of the total number of removals that year.
This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.