Last month, a federal judge in Los Angeles handed down a temporary order placing some restrictions on the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown in that city. The Trump administration now wants the Supreme Court to lift those restrictions.

The contested provisions of Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong’s order are fairly narrow. They provide that federal law enforcement may not rely “solely” on four factors when determining to stop or detain someone suspected of being an undocumented immigrant. Under Frimpong’s order, the government may not stop or detain someone solely because of 1) their “apparent race or ethnicity,” 2) the fact that they either speak Spanish or speak English with an accent, 3) their presence at a location such as an agricultural workplace or day laborer pick-up site, or 4) the type of work that they do.

Frimpong’s order prohibits the government from relying exclusively on any one of these factors or on any combination of them, so it could not detain someone solely because they speak Spanish and they are a day laborer, for example. The government may still rely on these four factors to determine whom to stop or detain, however, so long as it has other reasons for targeting a particular individual.

Thus, for example, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) could target someone because that person speaks Spanish, and they work as a day laborer, and they were witnessed getting into a truck owned by a company known for hiring undocumented immigrants, because one of the three factors that ICE considered in this hypothetical stop is not on Frimpong’s list.

That said, at least according to the Cato Institute’s David Bier, Frimpong’s order has drastically reduced the number of immigration arrests within Los Angeles.

New ICE data show that the court order banning profiling reduced ICE arrests in LA by 66%! In other words, ICE is effectively admitting that TWO THIRDS of LA arrests were unconstitutional profiling. Did they admit this to the court? NO! They lied to the courts…

The central issue in this case, known as Noem v. Perdomo, is what courts are practically able to do in order to rein in overzealous tactics by law enforcement. Judge Frimpong’s order is modest — again, it does not prevent the Trump administration from targeting anyone, just as long as part of the reason why a particular individual is targeted doesn’t appear on Frimpong’s list of four — but it is also unlikely to survive contact with a Republican Supreme Court that is extraordinarily solicitous toward Donald Trump.

Indeed, the Court has long cautioned lower court judges against issuing broad orders imposing across-the-board restrictions on law enforcement. One of the seminal cases that the Trump administration relied upon in its Perdomo brief was handed down in 1983, well before the Court’s recent partisan turn.

The Republican justices, in other words, likely will not even need to stretch the law very far if they want to rule in Trump’s favor in Perdomo.

What is ICE up to in Los Angeles?

The Perdomo case arises out of multiple immigration raids in Los Angeles, which have often taken place at job sites and other locations where the Trump administration believes that undocumented immigrants are often present. As........

© Vox