Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass announced Tuesday that the city will be joining a private class action civil lawsuit against the Trump administration over Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids.
The mayor has sided with protests against the ICE raids, even defending violent riots that have targeted federal, state, and local law enforcement, saying that the violence will stop when the ICE raids also stop.
A statement from Bass’s office said (emphasis removed):
“The federal government has concentrated thousands of armed immigration agents, many of whom lack visible identification, and military troops in our communities, conducting unconstitutional raids, roundups and anonymous detentions, sowing fear and chaos among our residents,” said Los Angeles City Attorney Hydee Feldstein Soto. “Today’s motion to intervene shows we will not stand by and allow these raids to continue or to become the standard operating procedure in our communities.”
Central to this effort is a request to intervene in a class action lawsuit “Perdomo v. Noem,” which was brought on behalf of people who have been unlawfully stopped or detained by federal agents. The lawsuit alleges that federal agencies, including U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and U.S. Customs and Border Protection have engaged in unconstitutional and unlawful immigration raids by targeting Angelenos based on their perceived race and ethnicity and also denying detainees constitutionally-mandated due process.
Today’s announcement comes after federal agents marched through MacArthur Park and militarized vehicles were deployed to the streets as children were attending a summer camp with the seemingly sole purpose of bringing fear to Los Angeles. Mayor Bass and other elected officials will not accept the presence of federalized troops and military-style vehicles on our streets becoming normalized behavior, and will use every resource available to bring an end to these reckless raids.
Bass’s announcement came a week after U.S. Attorney for the Central District of California filed a federal lawsuit against L.A. for its “sanctuary” policies, saying they discriminate against federal law enforcement.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of Trump 2.0: The Most Dramatic ‘First 100 Days’ in Presidential History, available for Amazon Kindle. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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