A federal judge ruled that the U.S. Border Patrol violated a court order during a July 2025 operation at a Sacramento Home Depot, finding that agents unlawfully detained 11 day laborers without reasonable suspicion, Law360 reported.
Keker of counsel Jason George said the court’s decision “represents an important rebuke of Border Patrol's unlawful practices.”
“The agency tried to justify sweeping, suspicionless stops and then paper over the problems by doctoring their arrest reports,” he said. “We are pleased that the court saw through their tactics and strengthened requirements to ensure accountability going forward.”
U.S. District Judge Jennifer Thurston determined that federal agents relied on “unsupported assumptions, hunches and generalizations” about immigration status, despite a prior injunction in United Farm Workers v. Noem prohibiting such conduct. The judge said agents “are trained that if they are involved in an action to arrest illegal aliens, while they are engaged in this effort, they are entitled to detain anyone they please, no matter where the people are encountered in relation to the target location. This is not the law.”
While the government conceded the agents lacked reasonable suspicion when they arrived at their targeted location, the court rejected its arguments that workers’ flight from masked agents could justify the stops.
The court also identified significant problems with the Border Patrol’s documentation of the arrests. Forms used to record enforcement actions were “unreliable, inaccurate, and under-inclusive,” the court found, with “virtually identical” boilerplate narratives that made it impossible to distinguish between arrests or corroborate them to video evidence.
The judge added that at least two of the forms were modified with “flatly incorrect” descriptions.
The ruling stems from a class action challenging immigration operations across California’s Eastern District, including sweeps near Bakersfield. The court reaffirmed that agents must have individualized reasonable suspicion to make arrests, and ordered stricter compliance measures, including requiring agents to personally document the specific facts supporting each stop.
The Keker team on the case includes George, Christina Lee, Franco Muzzio, Julia Greenberg, Natalie Heim, Reaghan Braun, and Zainab Ramahi. You can read the ruling here.
Read the Law360 article here. (Subscription required)
Several news outlets reported on the ruling, including the Daily Journal, Courthouse News, Daily Kos, and CalMatters.
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