The new colossus: DO NOT SEND ME YOUR TIRED, YOUR POOR, YOUR HUDDLED MASES YEARNING TO BREATH FREE

 

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 later established 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 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   and 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 tates 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, 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 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