In June, the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California found discriminatory "roving patrols" of ICE agents terrorized Los Angeles and its residents, targeting not those who had committed crimes (remember those promises), but anyone who looked Hispanic or spoke Spanish or was hanging out in Hispanic neighborhoods where men find jobs, at car washes and at Home Depot parking lots.
In early July, a federal judge put a stop to it, issuing a temporary restraining order that the government "may not rely solely, alone or in combination" on race or ethnicity; on a person's speaking Spanish, or English with an accent; on a person's presence at a particular location, such as a day-laborer or agricultural site; or on type of work performed to establish reasonable suspicion to stop and detain people.
The judge, in her 52-page opinion, pointed to a "mountain of evidence" of roundups of random Hispanic people by armed agents wearing masks; that's what the protests were all about. Last Friday, a three-judge appellate court upheld the order.
Which hasn't stopped the Trump administration from blatantly violating it this past week, using a rented Penske box truck to disguise their arrival at the Home Depot in a mostly Hispanic section of town.
When the masked ICE agents, in uniform, jumped out of the truck to apprehend the men hoping to find a day's work, the men started fleeing in the parking lot and the street, and the agents ran through the streets chasing them.
A targeted operation aimed specifically at those who, based on their investigation, ICE agents had a reasonable suspicion to stop?
Not exactly.
After the initial order, Mark Rosenbaum, a lawyer for Public Counsel, which, along with the ACLU, brought the suit, said, "The order reflects there is something very wrong when the federal government goes to war against an American city and ignores the Constitution.
"Hopefully this ends the actions of the government rounding up carwash workers and other hardworking people like they were domestic terrorists." Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass said the judge's ruling represented "American values and decency."
So much for ending the unconstitutionally discriminatory roving patrols.
So much for American values and decency. The Penske company reportedly did not authorize the rental that was designed to hide the ICE agents' arrival and trap the men.
That didn't stop the acting U.S. attorney for the Central District of California from crowing about it. "For those who thought immigration enforcement had stopped in Southern California, think again," he wrote on social media Wednesday.
"The enforcement of federal law is not negotiable, and there are no sanctuaries from the reach of the federal government."
Mayor Karen Bass sang a different tune: "For months federal agents have been masking themselves and now they're using rental trucks to conduct their seemingly discriminatory raids --- these tactics are dangerous," the mayor's office said. "Tactics like this are un-American and we will never accept these terrorizing ploys as a new normal."
They are the "new normal" for this administration, so long as they can find ways around court orders.
The Department of Homeland Security said that the operation, named Trojan Horse, another name for the Penske truck, was according to DHS a "targeted raid" that led to arrests of 16 undocumented immigrants from Guatemala, Mexico, Honduras and Nicaragua.
No mention whether any of them were criminals, were identified in advance as targets, were subject to individualized suspicion --- no evidence, in short, that this was anything other than one of those "roving patrols" of anonymous, random Hispanics looking for work.
Technically, the parties are studying whether this week's raid violates the court order.
Practically, how could it not?
The question is what the court will do about it, and whether ICE will listen.
Those shouldn't be hard questions in our democracy, but with this administration, they are.