The Trump administration filed a petition to the Supreme Court on Thursday seeking a pause of a lower court’s restrictions on federal officials’ conduct of immigration operations in Southern California.
Solicitor General D. John Sauer requested the high court stay an order in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, which includes Los Angeles, that prevents federal immigration officers from relying on apparent race, language spoken, location, or job as sole reasons to inquire about a person’s immigration status.
Sauer claimed that the sweeping injunction, which an appeals court declined to stay last weekend, was unlawful in restricting federal immigration officers in an area with an estimated millions of illegal immigrants.
“This injunction inflicts manifest irreparable harm on the government,” Sauer wrote. “The injunction wrongly brands countless lawful stops as unconstitutional, thereby hampering a basic law-enforcement tool, while turning every single stop in the District into a potential contempt trap.”
“No agent can confidently enforce the law and engage in routine stops when the district court may later refuse to credit that the stop reflected additional, permissible factors and instead treat virtually any stop as contemptuous misconduct,” Sauer added.
Justice Department lawyers also asked the justices for an immediate administrative stay as they consider the applications on the high court’s emergency docket.
“Every day that the district court’s order remains in effect, law-enforcement officers throughout the most populous district in the country are laboring under the threat of judicial contempt, daunted by the prospect that their good-faith efforts to enforce federal law will be retrospectively deemed to violate a far-reaching, unlawful, and ill-defined injunction,” Sauer said.
Immigration raids in the Los Angeles area have caused protests and some unrest as federal officials seek to detain and deport illegal immigrants as part of the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration agenda.
SUPREME COURT’S EMERGENCY DOCKET ORDERS FRUSTRATE LIBERAL JUSTICES
The Thursday request for a stay from the Trump administration is the latest instance of the Justice Department resorting to the Supreme Court’s emergency docket to pause sweeping lower court rulings.
The Trump administration has been granted several high-profile stays by the justices on the emergency docket, including in cases involving the firing of independent agency heads and ending temporary immigration programs.