In late November, the Editorial Board urged a federal judge to unseal an administrative warrant obtained by immigration authorities to search a Cato nutrition bar factory to find that it was employing undocumented workers. Agents arrested more than 100 workers in the September raid and took 57 of them into custody. We wanted to know if the warrant allowed them to do so.
The answer is an emphatic no.
The warrant remains sealed. Its contents were revealed in a separate case decided by US District Court Judge Brenda Sannes just before the Christmas holiday.
One of the 57 workers arrested that day, Argentina Juarez-Lopez, accused federal agents of violating her Fourth Amendment right against illegal search and seizure. She sued to exclude the evidence they collected that day.
In a scathing, 27-page ruling issued Dec. 18, Sannes ruled that federal agents exceeded the scope of the administrative order they obtained from U.S. Magistrate Judge Therese Wiley Dancks.
The warrant gave them permission to search records for evidence of labor and immigration law violations. Neither the administrative warrant nor the second criminal warrant “granted the authority to detain or arrest any person,” Sannes wrote.
The government claimed that Juarez-Lopez “freely admitted to being in the United States illegally,” but could provide no evidence to support this. Body camera footage showed him asking for a lawyer, twice. “The agents arrested the defendant based on a confession that evidently never happened,” Sannes wrote.
“The behavior of the agents here was grossly negligent at best,” Sannes concluded. She granted Juarez-Lopez’s motion to suppress the evidence against her.
The ruling had no practical impact on her case. She was held in an immigration detention facility in Louisiana until her deportation to Guatemala.
The district court’s ruling applies only to Juarez-Lopez’s arrest; that won’t help the other 56 people detained that day in Cato. Nor does it set a national precedent. But it’s still important. As Michelle Breidenbach said, “The decision is a strong rebuke of the tactics federal agents used to get into the factory. It could help clarify what the government needs to put in place to secure a search warrant and how a large raid must be conducted.”
“There is good reason to determine future behavior of the type that occurred here,” Sannes wrote.
Federal immigration laws and enforcement of those laws are complex and varied. Current federal immigration leaders, spokespeople and officials exploit this weakness and repeatedly lie about the facts, circumstances and laws. The courts rightly blamed them. We reiterate our call for federal and state courts to review future requests for injunctions. The judiciary must hold federal immigration authorities to the letter and spirit of the Constitution, which protects citizens and noncitizens alike.
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