A federal judge ordered the Trump administration to cease making warrantless immigration arrests in the District of Columbia.
According to Judge Beryl Howell’s order, “defendants and their agents are preliminarily enjoined from enforcing their policy or practice of making warrantless civil immigration arrests in the District of Columbia without a pre-arrest individualized determination by the arresting agent of probable cause that the person being arrested is likely to escape before a warrant can be obtained.”
“Put simply, immigration enforcement officers may conduct a warrantless civil immigration arrest only if they have probable cause to believe that a person is both in the United States unlawfully and an escape risk,” Howell wrote in the decision, arguing that the Trump administration’s “systemic failure to apply the probable cause standard, including the failure to consider escape risk, directly violates the clear statutory requirement.”
“Rather than the possible alternative excuse that such public statements are the result of ignorance or incompetence on the part of DHS’s high-ranking officials and legal counsel, the better, straight-forward explanation is that DHS’s statements derive from an intentional policy and practice of conducting warrantless civil immigration arrests without the requisite probable cause findings,” the judge argued.
The initial lawsuit, filed in September, claimed that federal agents have been “indiscriminately arresting without warrants and without probable cause District residents whom the agents perceive to be Latino.”
According to U.S. Code, however, officials can arrest an illegal immigrant “if he has reason to believe that the alien so arrested is in the United States in violation of any such law or regulation and is likely to escape before a warrant can be obtained for his arrest, but the alien arrested shall be taken without unnecessary delay for examination before an officer of the Service having authority to examine aliens as to their right to enter or remain in the United States.”
