Behind the Scenes: How the ACLU Won a Court Order Blocking Border Patrol's Racist Arrests Targeting Latinos

It was Jan. 7, 2025, in the middle of the citrus harvest season in California’s Central Valley. People who earn their livings picking fruit were going about their daily routines. All of a sudden, residents of Bakersfield and the surrounding area started disappearing.

Maricela Sanchez, an investigator at the ACLU of Northern California, started seeing photos and videos in her social media feed of U.S. Border Patrol trucks stopping people by the side of the road.

She knew their presence in this area was highly unusual. So she immediately notified the ACLU NorCal legal team. She also reached out to our ACLU affiliate in Southern California. They started keeping tabs on what people on the ground were reporting about federal agents stopping and arresting people for no reason—other than their skin color.

“I was in complete shock. I was devasted, stressed out and very worried about my community,” Sanchez remembers. “I’m born and raised in the Central Valley, and I have family who were agricultural workers.”

Our partner, Kern County Rapid Response Network, took to Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok to sound the alarm. The Network is made up of volunteers, community members, and immigration advocates who respond to and verify ICE activity in their communities.

They warned people: Be careful. Remember your right to stay silent and to decline a search. Don’t open your door.

Border Patrol agents were snatching people from their cars, some of which were left abandoned by the side of the road. They grabbed farm workers from a coffee shop and arrested several others at a popular gas station.

They smashed people’s car windows and slashed their tires. They threw a grandmother to the ground. Legal residents and U.S. citizens were detained. They did all this unlawfully and without warrants.

Frantic family members, meanwhile, were searching the ICE detention locator website for names of their loved ones. People thought at first that ICE was behind the raids and Border Patrol was just helping out. But none of the names of the people they were looking for were showing up in the locator.

Around midnight on the third day of the raids, Bree Bernwanger, a senior attorney at ACLU NorCal, decided to check the ICE locator again before going to bed. She typed in the name of someone who’d been arrested. Up popped, “in CBP custody,” short for “Customs and Border Protection”—the parent agency for Border Patrol.

“It didn’t say where, but that’s when it really sunk in that whatever was going on was unlike anything we had ever seen before,” said Bernwanger. “Certainly unlike anything I’d ever seen before.”

She would eventually learn that Border Patrol agents from near the U.S.-Mexico border had come 300 miles to Bakersfield to conduct raids over several days. Their own records show they had arrested 78 people and transported them hundreds of miles back to their station near the border. There, they locked detainees in frigid cells without blankets, deprived them of food, and refused to allow them to speak to a lawyer.

It was a cruel tactic to strip people of their right to an immigration hearing and coerce them instead into agreeing to “voluntary departure”—a form of expulsion that bars someone from returning to the U.S. for up to 10 years and rips them away from their families.

Border Patrol officials were threatening to extend the unlawful raids up to Fresno and Sacramento. We knew we had to stop them.

What then ensued over the next frenzied seven weeks was a full-court press by a team of attorneys and investigators from the ACLU’s California affiliates and immigrants’ rights advocates, working with people who had been stopped and arrested, many of whom were forcibly returned to Mexico, and their family members left behind.

We decided to file a federal class action lawsuit to get an order blocking Border Patrol from further terrorizing immigrant communities in Kern County. But first we had to build a solid legal case challenging the inhumane and despicable Border Patrol operation dubbed “Operation Return to Sender.”

And so began an intensive and painstaking fact-gathering process.

The ACLU team identified five Kern County residents to be plaintiffs, along with the United Farm Workers (UFW). The law firm Keker, Van Nest & Peters LLP, joined the effort as our pro bono partner.

On February 26, we filed a class action lawsuit against Department of Homeland Security, CBP, and U.S. Border Patrol officials over their pattern and practice of violating people’s Fourth Amendment rights against arrest without probable cause, and federal law. Soon after, we moved for a preliminary injunction to stop Border Patrol’s unlawful practices while the lawsuit was pending.

On April 28, U.S. District Judge Jennifer Thurston held the first hearing on the case in the federal courthouse in Fresno. Immigrants’ rights advocates and community members packed the courtroom. UFW organizers filed in with their red UFW shirts and sat in the front row. Local public defenders, ACLU staff members, volunteers, and others turned out to show solidarity with all of those who’d been arrested and could not be there.

The government couldn’t present a single fact to refute our clients’ claims that federal agents had violated their constitutional rights even when pressed to do so by the judge.

The next morning, in a huge victory for civil rights, Judge Thurston issued a preliminary injunction covering the Eastern District federal court, which encompasses the entire California Central Valley. The order bars U.S. Border Patrol from stopping people in violation of the Fourth Amendment or arresting them without complying with federal law.

The order states that agents cannot stop someone unless they have a valid, specific reason to suspect that they are not citizens. The fact that a person’s skin is brown is not a valid reason.

Similarly, Border Patrol must have probable cause to believe someone is likely to flee in order to arrest them without a warrant.

The judge further ruled that Border Patrol must document all future stops and warrantless arrests and provide that information to the plaintiffs in the lawsuit every 60 days.

Time will tell how the case ultimately plays out. But as Trump continues to run roughshod over civil liberties, this ruling at least makes it clear that immigration agencies are bound by the law. The ACLU in California and across the country will continue to fight Trump’s racist and unlawful mass deportations.

Tammerlin Drummond is a principal communications strategist at the ACLU of Northern California.