Federal Court Blocks Warrantless Immigration Arrests in Southern California, Certifies Class — Finds the Practice Is Policy, Not Rogue Agents

Federal Court Blocks Warrantless Immigration Arrests in Southern California, Certifies Class — Finds the Practice Is Policy, Not Rogue Agents

On Sept. 16, 2026, a federal court granted a preliminary injunction in Vasquez Perdomo v. Mullin barring the government's practice of warrantless immigration arrests in the Central District of California without first determining whether a person is likely to escape before a warrant can be obtained — the statutory gatekeeper for warrantless civil immigration arrests. The court also certified a class of everyone arrested without a warrant and without an individualized escape-risk assessment since June 6, 2025.

The evidentiary core: "of a sample of 113 arrest records produced by the government in discovery, nearly 80 percent either contained no escape-risk assessment at all or relied largely on boilerplate language¹." The court found agents are "regularly abstaining from conducting a likelihood of escape analysis at all," and that DHS's own agents' testimony supported the conclusion that this was "due to this illegal warrantless arrest policy and not 'isolated instances of agents going rogue.'²" The order specifically bars reliance on the January 2026 memo from then-acting ICE director Todd Lyons that treated being undocumented itself as sufficient likelihood of escape, and requires agents to document their escape-risk analysis in the Central District.

"This ruling is one of the most important decisions to date in the community's effort to end the federal government's cruel and illegal practice of abducting people and separating them from their families," said Mayra Joachin, senior staff attorney at ACLU Foundation of Southern California. "By requiring immigration agents to follow the law's requirement to make escape risk determinations before they can arrest someone without a warrant, this court order should put an end to hundreds–if not more–of unlawful arrests that continue throughout Southern California."

This is the judiciary directly constraining the machinery of mass deportation on procedural-statutory grounds — the same court-versus-enforcement pattern as the polling-place agent deployment suits (LULAC, NAACP) now working through the dockets.