The new
colossus: DO NOT SEND ME YOUR TIRED, YOUR POOR, YOUR HUDDLED MASES YEARNING TO
BREATH FREE
Perdomo v. Noem, 790 F. Supp. 3d 850
(C.D. Cal. 2025)
"Give
me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free"
Emma
Lazarus
So
engrained in our national ethic were those words at the base of the Statue of
Liberty that Ronald Reagan – whose conservative bona fides were beyond question
– stood on the deck of an aircraft carrier near the Statue to mark our nation’s
bicentennial.
But half
a century later the Department of Homeland Security searches
for unauthorized immigrants in Maine under the rubric of “Catch of the
Day”. Like Lewiston and Portland, Maine,
Minnesota is home to many Somali emigrees embraced by Lazarus’s famous words.
But
today’s President – Donald J. Trump strikes a gravely different tone. Speaking
of Minnesota he has said
“It's a rigged state. And the Somalians vote as one group
even if they're not citizens. They all ought to get the hell out of here.
They're bad for our country.”
After
swarming Minneapolis with thousands of masked ICE troops attention turned to Los Angeles
where United States District Judge Maame Frimpong found that agents have seized people based on language and
appearance but the agents’ “knowledge that undocumented individuals use and
seek work at car washes falls woefully short of the reasonable suspicion needed
to target any particular individual at any particular car wash.”
The Judge asked:
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?
Yes, it is.
• Is it
unlawful to prevent people from having access to lawyers who can help them in
immigration court? Yes, it is.
And, further,
are the individuals and organizations
who brought this lawsuit likely to succeed in proving that the federal
government is indeed conducting roving patrols without reasonable suspicion and
denying access to lawyers? This Court decides—based on all the evidence
presented—that they are.
And second, what should be done about
it?
The District Judge found that [DHS]
failed to provide any concrete details as to what factors led Defendants to
stop and question Gomez specifically nor indicate the nature of surveillance
and intelligence data gathered that would give rise to reasonable suspicion.
The District Judge explained that “the
field agents' testimony (that it was "INS policy to conduct complete
sweeps of all community residences, with or without information as to specific
residences") … contradicted the official policy of the defendant agency
(that such sweeps should be done only upon "individualized
suspicion"),
- The
Judge therefor ordered DHS to cease stop, explaining that “[r]eliance
solely on factors such as race/ethnicity, speaking Spanish/English with an
accent, presence at a particular location, or type of work does not
constitute reasonable suspicion for immigration stops.
Perdomo v. Noem, 790 F. Supp. 3d 850,
894 n.29, 33 (C.D. Cal. 2025)”
Today we are again faced with the challenge
Emma Lazarus posed. Unfortunately the
majority of the United States Supreme Court in a summary order lifted the
injunction granted by a United States District Judge in California. Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh found that
ICE agents “may briefly detain” an individual “for questioning” if they have a
“reasonable suspicion…that the person is an alien illegally in the United
States.”
But Associate Justice Sonia
Sotomayor’s description of ICE conduct departs markedly from Justice
Kavanaugh’s sanitized version. She
concluded that the four factors cited by the government do not “taken together
..satisfy the Fourth Amendment’s requirement of reasonable suspicion.” The District Court, she concluded, properly
temporarily enjoined the Government from continuing its pattern of unlawful
mass arrests.”
The four factors are generalized, not
specific: 1) apparent race or ethnicity, 2) whether they spoke Spanish or
English “with an accent”, 3) their location such as at a car wash or bus stop,
and 4) the type of job they appeared to work.
Individualized suspicion is not satisfied, Sotomayor wrote...but Justice
Kavanaugh was satisfied, asserting that 2 million of the 20 million residents of Los Angeles area are present “illegally”.
Even if Kavanaugh’s estimate is correct the
Department of Homeland Security has embarked on a campaign of mass deportation
of unprecedented scope which would drastically affect life in LA and elsewhere,
disrupting schools, the labor force, and much more.
ICE has announced it is now deploying its
forces to Maine which, like Minneapolis, has a substantial population of Somali
refugees from war and tyranny.
We recognize that significant effort
is required to accommodate emigrees. But
our country has been built on such a foundation. Emigrees come here fleeing poverty tyranny,
climate sister and in hope of liberty and prosperity. Generosity, not hostility, should guide our
policies.
-
George Conk
-
1/21/2026
