A California Court Just Confirmed What Immigrant Communities Already Knew: ICE Has Been Breaking Its Own Law for a Year

On September 2, a federal judge in the Central District of California granted a preliminary injunction in Vasquez Perdomo v. Mullin, ruling that Trump's immigration agents have been systematically violating the narrow legal standard that lets them arrest people without a warrant. The court didn't just scold the government — it certified a class covering everyone arrested without a warrant in Southern California since June 6, 2025, and ordered agents to start documenting, case by case, why they believed someone was actually a flight risk before cuffing them.

The law here isn't ambiguous. A warrantless civil immigration arrest requires probable cause both that someone is undocumented and that they're likely to flee before an agent could get a warrant. In discovery, the government handed over 113 sample arrest records. Nearly 80 percent had no escape-risk assessment at all, or leaned on recycled boilerplate. ICE's own agents testified under oath that the failure wasn't rogue officers going off-script — it was policy, flowing from a January 2026 memo by then-acting director Todd Lyons that treated "undocumented" and "flight risk" as the same thing. They aren't. The court said so in writing.

This isn't an isolated ruling. A similar injunction landed in the District of Oregon in February, another in DC in May — different judges, different plaintiffs, the same finding: agents skipping the legal threshold entirely and grabbing people off sidewalks, outside courthouses, at job sites, because the administration decided that being undocumented was reason enough. The pattern only becomes visible because plaintiffs — CHIRLA, the United Farm Workers, day laborer networks, individual workers who came forward and testified — forced the discovery that exposed it. The state doesn't self-report constitutional violations; it gets dragged into court by the people it's targeting.

None of this stops the raids. An injunction is a leash, not a cage — it requires paperwork, not an end to the dragnet. TRAC's most recent figures put ICE detention at over 65,000 people nationwide, more than 70 percent of them with no criminal conviction at all. That number has sat above 70 percent for over a year now, through multiple court losses, because "compliance" for this administration has meant writing better boilerplate, not making fewer illegal arrests. The Central District ruling requires documentation of escape-risk reasoning — a paper trail that's better than nothing, and a long way from abolition.

What matters here isn't the legal technicality, it's the confirmation. Every farmworker in Oxnard, every day laborer in downtown LA, every family that watched a parent disappear from a job site over the last fifteen months was right: this was never enforcement, it was an illegal policy of mass seizure dressed up in agency letterhead. The courts are only now catching up to what the UFW and CHIRLA and NDLON organizers have been saying since June of last year. Solidarity isn't owed to the judges who took a year to notice — it's owed to the workers and organizers who kept showing up to depositions, kept documenting raids, kept the pressure on long enough that a court finally had no choice but to look at the paperwork.

Sources

ACLU SoCal: Federal Court Blocks Unlawful Warrantless Immigration Arrests
TRAC Immigration: Detention Quick Facts
Innovation Law Lab: Oregon preliminary injunction opinion
ACLU DC: memorandum opinion on escape-risk standard