Federal immigration agents toss tear gas at protesters during a raid in the agriculture area of Camarillo, Calif., Thursday, July 10, 2025. AP Photo / Michael Owen Baker

After weeks of brazen rights violations and outright impunity from America’s secret police force, a federal judge in Los Angeles on Friday issued a sharp rebuke of the racist tactics of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

U.S. District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong blocked ICE’s “roving” patrols in Southern California, halting agents from carrying out unconstitutional arrests based on racial profiling alone. Going forward, they’ll need to have specific grounds for believing someone to be undocumented before they can make an arrest.

“Is it illegal to conduct roving patrols which identify people based upon race alone, aggressively question them, and then detain them without a warrant, without their consent, and without reasonable suspicion that they are without status?” the judge wrote. “Yes, it is.”

While the temporary restraining order is a rightful recognition of the deportation machine’s racist operations, it is unlikely to hinder a border regime that holds racist exclusion as its organizing principle and unaccountable brute force as standard procedure.

Just a day earlier, the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant campaign took a life in farmland north of Los Angeles. Jaime Alanis, a Mexican farmworker, fell more than 30 feet from a greenhouse when federal agents on Thursday stormed the state-licensed cannabis farm in Ventura County, Calif., where he had worked for over a decade. Alanis died from his injuries in hospital.

ICE agents detained over 200 people in militarized raids on two large farms in Carpinteria and Camarillo, including a number of U.S. citizen workers and protesters who gathered outside the facilities in response to the raids. As of Saturday morning, at least two of the abducted citizens were still reported missing by loved ones and colleagues.

“Many workers-including U.S. citizens, were held by federal authorities at the farm for 8 hours or more,” the United Farm Workers union said in a statement. “U.S. citizen workers report only being released after they were forced to delete photos and videos of the raid from their phones.”

Thursday’s raids led to a reported eight hospitalizations and multiple other injuries. Alanis’ tragic death is not a freak accident, but the consequence of the government’s program of militarized human hunting. In scenes now familiar in California and beyond, footage showed federal agents bombarding protesters with tear gas and rubber bullets.

And such tactics are likely to continue even after Judge Frimpong’s order, which does not apply to raids with warrants aimed at workplaces.

“These violent and cruel federal actions terrorize American communities, disrupt the American food supply chain, threaten lives and separate families.”

A heavily armed, masked army dedicated to rounding up poor brown people en masse will inevitably perpetrate and oversee death-dealing acts. We have all seen videos showing extreme force by ICE and other federal agents: they have chased farm workers through the fields, pummeled immigrants pinned down on the street, smashed car windows and dragged people from their vehicles. Abuses and rights violations in immigrant detention centers are rampant.

None of this is new in the unbroken American tradition of racist state violence and border rule. Under President Donald Trump’s border regime, though, violent escalation in immigration enforcement has been lauded, licensed, and now supercharged with unprecedented funding. The consequence will be more deaths like Alanis’, more deaths in ICE custody, like the 13 that have already taken place this year alone, atop a baseline of suffering for millions.

“These violent and cruel federal actions terrorize American communities, disrupt the American food supply chain, threaten lives and separate families,” the United Farm Workers said.

Numerous workers and protesters detained by ICE on Thursday remain unaccounted for. One farm security guard – George Retes, 25, a U.S. citizen and disabled army veteran – was reportedly attempting to leave the area when agents grabbed him from his car.

“They broke his window, they pepper-sprayed him, they grabbed him, threw him on the floor. They detained him,” his sister, Destinee Majana, told reporters in tears. Retes had not been located 24 hours after the raid. His status as a citizen does not make state violence against him somehow worse, but his abduction highlights the indiscriminate and unconstrained nature of these racist roundups. Jonathan Caravello, a U.S. citizen and professor at California State University Channel Islands, remains missing as well.

“4 masked agents dragged Jonathan away into an unmarked [vehicle] without identifying themselves, without giving the reason for arrest, and without disclosing where they are taking him,” the California Faculty Association posted on social media on Friday.

The Department of Homeland Security said in a statement that “four U.S. citizens are being criminally processed for assaulting or resisting officers” – claims that the government routinely levies against individuals who have been groundlessly arrested, including in the recent bunk arrests of New York City Comptroller Brad Lander and New Jersey Democratic Rep. LaMonica McIver.

In a predictably mendacious press release, DHS described the Thursday raids as heroic efforts, in which federal agents “rescued at least 10 migrant children.”

“The UFW is also aware of reports of child labor on site,” the United Farm Workers union said in its statement. “The UFW demands the immediate facilitation of independent legal representation for the minor workers, to protect them from further harm. Farm workers are excluded from basic child labor laws.” The union added, “To be clear: detaining and deporting children is not a solution for child labor.”

Recent Republican efforts around child labor, meanwhile, have involved proposing and passing legislation in states nationwide to loosen child labor protections, including for work on construction sites and in factories. Caging and deporting immigrant children is another bipartisan practice that Republicans are aggressively ramping up.

In the face of the Trump administration’s escalating violence, anti-ICE protesters continue crucial efforts to impede the detention and deportation machine. Judge Frimpong’s order marks a rare check on ICE from the courts, but it won’t stop the administration from its cruel campaign.

On Friday, the same day as the district court ruling and the death of Alanis, Trump announced on social media that he was giving “Total Authorization for ICE to protect itself” against protesters who “assault” agents by arresting them “using whatever means is necessary to do so.”