Supreme Court Stays Order Blocking Roving Immigration Patrols in CA

In Noem v. Perdomo, 606 U.S. ____ (2025), the U.S. Supreme Court granted an emergency application for stay that temporarily blocks a district court order restricting immigration enforcement in California. The order by U.S. District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong barred federal agents in the Central District of California from making immigration stops without reasonable suspicion that the person being stopped is in the country illegally.

Facts of the Case

On June 6, 2025, U.S. Customs and Border Patrol agents and officers were sent to join officers from the Enforcement and Removal Operations directorate of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to carry out “Operation At Large” in Los Angeles, California. The operation involved “contact teams” that generally consist of three to five agents who contact individuals in public places such as streets, sidewalks, and publicly accessible portions of businesses. Over the course of the next month, the Government made nearly 2,800 immigration-related arrests and detained many more.

The Immigration and Nationality Act (8 U.S.C. §1357(a)(1)) authorizes immigration officers to “interrogate any alien or person believed to be an alien as to his right to be or to remain in the United States.”  Immigration officers “may briefly detain” an individual “for questioning” if they have “a reasonable suspicion, based on specific articulable facts, that the person being questioned. . . is an alien illegally in the United States.” Under existing Supreme Court precedent, the reasonable suspicion inquiry turns on the “totality of the particular circumstances.” 

Five individual plaintiffs and three membership associations filed a putative class action against Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem and other senior federal immigration enforcement officials.The suit alleged that the defendants have an ongoing policy, pattern, and/or practice of conducting detentive stops without reasonable suspicion that the person to be stopped is within the United States in violation of immigration law, in contravention of the Fourth Amendment.

The district court granted plaintiffs’ motion for a TRO prohibiting federal officials from conducting detentive stops for the purposes of immigration enforcement without first establishing individualized, reasonable suspicion that the person to be stopped was unlawfully in the United States. The district court ordered that, “except as permitted by law,” defendants were not permitted to rely solely, alone or in combination, on the following factors to form reasonable suspicion for a detentive stop: apparent race or ethnicity; speaking Spanish or speaking English with an accept; presence at a particular location; the type of work one does.

After the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals largely refused to stay the order, the Government asked the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene, arguing that the district court order “threatens to upend immigration officials’ ability to enforce the immigration laws in the Central District of California by hanging the prospect of contempt over every investigative stop of suspected illegal aliens.”

Supreme Court Order

On September 8, 2025, the Court granted the emergency application for stay. The district court order is stayed pending the disposition of the appeal in the Ninth Circuit and disposition of a petition for a writ of certiorari, if such a writ is sought.

In a concurring opinion, Justice Brett Kavanaugh found that the Government had demonstrated a “fair prospect of reversal” of the District Court’s injunction. Justice Kavanaugh first determined that, under the Court’s decision in Los Angeles v. Lyons, 461 U.S. 95 (1983), plaintiffs likely lack Article III standing to seek a broad injunction restricting immigration officers from making these investigative stops. 

In Lyons, the Court held that standing to obtain future injunctive relief does not exist merely because plaintiffs experienced past harm and fear its recurrence. As Justice Kavanaugh emphasized, the key issue is the “reality of the threat of repeated injury,” not “subjective apprehensions.” In this case, he argued that while the challengers may have been stopped in the past, they “have no good basis to believe that law enforcement will unlawfully stopthemin the future based on the prohibited factors.”

Justice Kavanaugh went on to find that even if plaintiffs had standing, the Government has a fair prospect of succeeding on the Fourth Amendment issue. In support, he cited that although “apparent ethnicity alone cannot furnish reasonable suspicion” for an immigration stop, reasonable suspicion can rest on the “totality of the circumstances.” He further wrote:

Here, those circumstances include: that there is an extremely high number and percentage of illegal immigrants in the Los Angeles area; that those individuals tend to gather in certain locations to seek daily work; that those individuals often work in certain kinds of jobs, such as day labor, landscaping, agriculture, and construction, that do not require paperwork and are therefore especially attractive to illegal immigrants; and that many of those illegally in the Los Angeles area come from Mexico or Central America and do not speak much English. To be clear, apparent ethnicity alone cannot furnish reasonable suspicion; under this Court’s case law regarding immigration stops, however, it can be “relevant factor” when considered along with other salient factors. Under this Court’s precedents, not to mention common sense, those circumstances taken together can constitute at least reasonable suspicion of illegal presence in the United States.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor filed a dissenting opinion, which was joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. “Instead of allowing the District Court to consider these troubling allegations in the normal course, a majority of this Court decides to take the once-extraordinary step of staying the District Court’s order. That decision is yet another grave misuse of our emergency docket,” Justice Sotomayor wrote. “We should not have to live in a country where the Government can seize anyone who looks Latino, speaks Spanish, and appears to work a low wage job. Rather than stand idly by while our constitutional freedoms are lost, I dissent.”