Listen To This Story

In what must have been one of the saddest moments of Stephen Miller and Tom Homan’s lives, a federal judge on Friday night blocked the Trump administration from indiscriminately arresting Hispanic people in the Los Angeles area solely for the “crime” of looking Hispanic.

District Court Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong, who was appointed to her position by Joe Biden, granted a pair of temporary restraining orders that will prevent government agents from racially profiling random brown people they see on the streets and directs the administration to make sure that the immigrants they do detain have access to legal counsel.

In her opinion, Frimpong noted that both parties were in agreement that the federal government may conduct large-scale immigration enforcement actions, that all individuals in the US share the rights outlined in the Fourth and Fifth Amendments of the Constitution, that it is 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,” and that those detained should not be prevented from having access to lawyers.

The questions she had to resolve, Frimpong added, were whether the individuals and rights organizations which had sued the Trump administration would be able to prove that its agents were indeed conducting such roving patrols and then denying the victims access to counsel.

“What the federal government would have this Court believe – in the face of a mountain of evidence presented in this case – is that none of this is actually happening,” she wrote.

Indeed, not a day goes by without new videos and reports surfacing that show how masked and heavily armed government agents, often without identifying themselves in any way, are rounding up brown people in the Los Angeles area.

Therefore, Frimpong ruled that, based on the evidence she was presented with, it is likely that the plaintiffs in the case will be able to prove that the government is “indeed conducting roving patrols without reasonable suspicion and denying access to lawyers.”

As a result, she is ordering the Trump administration to put an end to these indiscriminate raids and to allow detainees to meet with their attorneys.

Now, the question is whether that is going to happen.

That is anybody’s guess.

Earlier in the day, Homan, Trump’s “immigration czar” had asserted on Fox News that ICE agents “don’t need probable cause to walk up to somebody, briefly detain them, and question them” based on factors that include their physical appearance.

Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff responsible for white supremacy policy did not take the ruling well.

After spending part of his day on Fox News lying about immigrants, Democrats, and barely avoiding a hate-inspired aneurysm, he took to social media after the ruling to vent.  

“A communist judge in LA has ordered ICE to report directly to her and radical left NGOs — not the president,” Miller stated. “This is another act of insurrection against the United States and its sovereign people.”

Of course, what the judge has done is to direct the administration to follow the Constitution of the United States of America and the laws of the land.

Six months into Trump’s second term, that has proven to be a high bar for the president and his administration.

In his Navigating the Insanity columns, Klaus Marre provides the kind of hard-hitting, thought-provoking, and often humorous analysis you won’t find anywhere else.