The Brief

The Trump administration is backing off a push to rapidly deport three Guatemalan day laborers who were detained 200 miles north of the Mexico border after a federal judge blocked it from fast-tracking their removal.

The administration wanted to deport the men under a new policy that it adapted from one that previously was used nearly exclusively at the border, and only for immigrants who recently arrived in the U.S. Advocates said the case had the potential to signal whether the Trump administration could carry out its promised mass, rapid deportations across California

Judge Dana Sabraw issued a temporary restraining order Friday, prohibiting the government from removing the workers from the Southern District of California after their attorneys argued the agents stopped them without reasonable suspicion, in violation of their Fourth Amendment rights. The men were detained by Border Patrol agents in Pomona.

“There’s no dispute that the Fourth Amendment applies to people within the interior of the United States, is there?” Sabraw asked the attorney for the federal government, who argued the court didn’t have jurisdiction over the workers’ claims and who characterized the stops as consensual.

On Monday, the administration backed down.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Erin Dimbleby said during a court hearing that the men were no longer being processed for rapid removal without a hearing before an immigration judge. She added she was seeking assurances from federal immigration authorities that they would not be placed back in the process called expedited removal.

“No reason was given by the government, but we would guess that the government decided it did not want to produce the arresting Border Patrol agents to testify in court under oath on Thursday to justify the legality of their actions,” said Niels Frenzen, an attorney with the USC Gould School of Law Immigration Clinic who filed a habeas corpus petition on behalf of the workers. Habeas corpus is a constitutional right protecting people from unlawful imprisonment by the government.

The workers have not yet been released from custody, but they will now have a chance to appear before an immigration judge in court, giving them the opportunity to challenge their return to Guatemala and to argue that their due process rights were violated.

This case is similar to a lawsuit filed earlier this year by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of the United Farm Workers about sweeping immigration raids that rattled Kern County in January. In response to the ACLU’s claims that those raids violated farmworkers’ constitutional rights, the Department of Homeland Security said in court papers that it would retrain the Border Patrol agents on how to follow the Fourth Amendment, which governs police searches and arrests.

In that case, the judge barred the El Centro Border Patrol from carrying out warrantless immigration sweeps in areas governed by the federal courts’ Eastern District of California, which spans the Central Valley from Redding to Bakersfield. The district does not include Pomona, where Border Patrol agents arrested the day laborers in a raid on a Home Depot parking lot on April 22.

Detained while looking for work

The agents conducted the Home Depot arrests without warrants, court records show. At least nine people total were taken into custody in the parking lot sweep, the records state.

Jesus Domingo Ros, one of the men detained in Pomona, said in an interview that he was standing on a street corner near the Home Depot when agents appeared from all sides, grabbed him, and threw him to the ground, leaving him with bruises on his shoulder and knee.

“I panicked,” he said in Spanish, describing the instant he realized he was in custody of U.S. immigration authorities. “Just with everything you’re seeing on the news right now, I really panicked because we didn’t know what was going to happen.” He spoke to CalMatters last month at the Imperial Regional Detention Facility in Calexico, where he is now being held.

Protesters demand the release of the “The Pomona 5” during a press conference outside the Pomona Superior Courthouse, on May 6, 2025. Five day laborers were apprehended by border patrol officials outside of a Home Depot in Pomona on April 22, 2025.

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Ted Soqui

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CalMatters

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The 38-year-old Guatemalan said he crossed into the United States without federal authorization nearly three years ago and has been working in construction in Pomona ever since. He said he was looking for work when agents surrounded him. “I’ve never been arrested. I’ve never been detained. This is my first experience,” he said.

Before transferring him to the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, he said the El Centro Border Patrol agents held him and others in freezing cold cells for days while interrogating them about who they might know. The agents hung enlarged mug shots along the walls of their cells, demanding to know the names of the people in the mug shots and whether the workers knew them. “When we said we didn’t know them, they argued with us,” he said.

According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, agents arrested 10 people that day in Pomona and placed them into removal proceedings. No other agencies were involved, said Michael Scappechio, a spokesman for U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Advocates are adamant that more than 20 people were initially taken into custody, based on piecing together the accounts of different witnesses about what happened.

Federal officials defended their actions, saying agents were initially targeting a single individual with an active arrest warrant — a barber who they arrested at gunpoint. During the operation, nine other people were also taken into custody. Some of those detained had prior charges, including child abuse, assault with a deadly weapon, immigration violations, and DUI, said Hilton Beckham, the assistant commissioner for the Border Patrol’s office of public affairs.

At least two other Guatemalans — Yoni Jacinto Garcia and Edwin Juarez-Cobon — detained during the same immigration sweep outside the Home Depot in Pomona were facing the rapid removal process, court records show.

“All three men have been living in the United States for more than two years,” said Alexis Teodoro, Worker Rights Director at the Pomona Economic Opportunity Center.

Domingo Ros said he fled violence and poverty in his hometown, located directly on the border of Guatemala and Chiapas, Mexico. His brother is a legal permanent resident in Pomona, having successfully won an asylum case in the United States, he said.

“Looking for work is not a crime. Waiting for a job opportunity outside a Home Depot isn’t a threat to anyone,” said Teodoro.

Advocates said federal immigration authorities last week told Domingo Ros that he’d be back in Guatemala within days.

That’s because the Trump administration was trying to apply a new policy to his case that expands the powers of immigration officers to fast-track removals of people arrested in the interior of the country.

Trump's push to speed deportations

The process, known as expedited removal, allows immigration officers to remove certain non-citizens from the United States without a hearing before an immigration judge, according to the American Immigration Council. Historically, the process for bypassing immigration courts has been reserved primarily for areas close to the border and for migrants who arrived by sea or crossed the border within the prior two weeks.

The Trump administration released a new expedited removal policy on Jan. 21, allowing immigration officers to apply expedited removals across the entire United States, instead of only near the border and for people who had been in the country longer than two weeks.

“The effect of this change will be to enhance national security and public safety — while reducing government costs — by facilitating prompt immigration determinations,” says the notice of the policy change published online.

Advocates say it’s part of a broader effort to boost deportations by chipping away at the limited due process afforded to immigrants in the United States. The Trump administration has also cancelled grants that funded legal representation for children and for families separated during his first term. It fired dozens of immigration judges in Massachusetts, California, and Louisiana, and removed people to remote locations outside of the United States without a hearing, including to a notorious El Salvadoran high-security prison.

Trump and his supporters argue that using expedited removal will help alleviate the long-overburdened and backlogged immigration court system, which has more than 3.5 million cases pending. The swelling backlog has tripled since 2020, meaning detained migrants are waiting months and even years for their hearings.

"We have thousands of people that are ready to go out, and you can't have a trial for all of these people," Trump said last month from the Oval Office.

Detainees gather in a common area at one of the Adelanto ICE Processing Center housing units in Adelanto on Aug. 28, 2019.

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Chris Carlson

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AP Photo

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The policy places the burden on the person detained to prove that they’ve been in the country continuously for more than two years “to the satisfaction of an immigration officer.” In the past, it’s led to U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents being mistakenly deported.

“It isn’t reasonable to expect someone to carry around 24 months' worth of utility bills on their person at all times. There must be an opportunity, a reasonable opportunity, to provide evidence that they have been in the U.S. for longer than two years, if that is the case,” said Christian Penichet-Paul, the assistant vice president of policy & advocacy, at the National Immigration Forum, an immigrant advocacy non-profit in Washington D.C.

Similar efforts to speed up the process for deportations during Trump’s first administration were challenged in federal court. Initially, a district court granted a preliminary injunction in 2019 blocking the expansion of expedited removal, but this was overturned by the D.C. Circuit, allowing Homeland Security to expand its use of expedited removal while the lawsuit continued.

The legal battle blocked the policy from going into effect until late 2020. The Biden administration then rescinded it in early 2021.

The ACLU is suing again in D.C. District court to try to stop the expanded use of expedited removal. The government has filed a motion to dismiss the suit, claiming the court does not have jurisdiction.

“We think it’s unconstitutional. People who have been in the country clearly have due process rights, and the entire expedited removal process gives people less process than you do when you get a traffic ticket,” said Anand Balakrishnan, senior staff attorney at the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project.

The use of expedited removal to bypass the court system and deport people was rising before Trump was re-elected president. In fiscal year 2013, the numbers peaked when Barack Obama was president, at 193,032 people detained at the border who went through the expedited removal process. That represented 44% of the total number of removals that year.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

This story first appeared on The LA Local.

Since 1977, Richard Santillan has been to every Opening Day game at Dodger Stadium. 

“The tradition goes from my father, to me, to my children and grandchildren. Some of my best memories are with my father and children here at Dodger Stadium,” Santillan told The LA Local, smiling under the shade of palm trees near the entrance to the ballpark Wednesday morning. He was there to protest the team less than 24 hours before Opening Day.

Santillan, like countless other loyal Dodgers fans, is grappling with his fan identity over the team’s decision to accept an invitation to the White House and owner Mark Walter’s ties to ICE detention facilities.

More than 30 people joined Santillan on Wednesday morning for a press conference held near 1000 Vin Scully Drive to convey a message directly to the team. 

“We are demanding the Dodgers stop participating in funding of inhumane treatment of families and do not go to the White House to celebrate with the criminal in chief,” Evelyn Escatiola told the crowd. “Together, we have the power to make a change.”

Escatiola, a former dean of East Los Angeles College and longtime community organizer, urged fans to flex their economic power by “letting the Dodgers know that we do not support repression.”

Jorge “Coqui” Rodriguez, a lifelong Dodgers fan, spoke to the crowd and called on Dodgers ownership to divest from immigration detention centers owned and operated by GEO Group and CoreCivic.

Jorge Coqui H Rodriguez speaks at a press conference outside Dodger Stadium on March 25, 2026, to demand the Dodgers not to visit the White House following their 2025 World Series win.

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J.W. Hendricks

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The LA Local

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In a phone interview a day before the protest, Rodriguez told The LA Local he did not want the Dodgers using his “cheve” or beer money to fund detention centers. 

“They can’t take our parking money, our cacahuate money, our cheve money, our Dodger Dog money and invest those funds into corporations that are imprisoning people. It’s wrong,” Rodriguez said. 

Rodriguez considers the Dodgers one of the most racially diverse teams and said the players need to support fans at a time when heightened immigration enforcement has become more common across L.A.

The team’s 2025’s visit to the White House drew ire from the largely Latino fan base, citing the Trump administration’s ongoing attacks on immigrants. 

In June, the team came under further scrutiny when rumors swirled online that federal immigration agents were using the stadium’s parking, which immigration authorities later denied in statements posted on social media accounts.

The team again came under fire after not releasing a statement on the impacts of ICE raids on its mostly Latino fan base at the height of immigration enforcement last summer. The team later agreed to invest $1 million to support families affected by immigration enforcement.

When he learned the Dodgers were pledging only $1 million to families in need, Rodriguez called the amount a  “slap in the face.” 

“These guys just bought the Lakers for billions of dollars and they give a million dollars to fight for legal services? That’s a joke,” Rodriguez said. “They need to have a moral backbone and not be investing in those companies.”

According to reporting from the Los Angeles Times, former Dodgers pitcher Clayton Kershawsaid last week that he is looking forward to the trip.

“I went when President [Joe] Biden was in office. I’m going to go when President [Donald] Trump is in office,” Kershaw said. “To me, it’s just about getting to go to the White House. You don’t get that opportunity every day, so I’m excited to go.”

The Dodgers have yet to announce when their planned visit will take place. 

Santillan sometimes laments his decision to give up his season tickets in protest of the team. His connection to the stadium and the memories he has made there with family and friends will last a lifetime, he said. On Thursday, he will uphold his tradition and be there for the first pitch of the season, but with a heavy heart.

“It’s a family tradition, but the Dodgers have a lot of work to do,” he said.

A local favorite mom-and-pop bookshop in Eagle Rock is facing displacement due to a steep rent hike. The owners say theirs is just one of several small businesses along Eagle Rock Boulevard struggling to keep up with lease increases.

Over the past 19 years, many in the neighborhood have come to love READ Books for its eclectic collection of used titles and shop dog Florence.

Co-owner Jeremy Kaplan said it’s been a delight to grow with the community over the years.

“Like seeing kids come back in, who were in grade school and now they’re in college,” Kaplan said.

But the building where Kaplan and wife Debbie rent was recently sold, and the rent increased by more than 130% to $2,805 a month, Kaplan said. He told LAist it was an increase his small business simply could not absorb.

Kaplan said he originally was given 30 days notice of the rent increase. After some research, assistance from Councilmember Ysabel Jurado’s office and some pro-bono legal help, Kaplan said he pushed back and got the 90-day notice he’s afforded by state law.

California Senate Bill 1103 requires landlords to give businesses with five or less employees 90 days’ notice for rent increases exceeding 10%, among other protections.

Systems Real Estate, the property management company, did not immediately respond to LAist’s request for comment.

What can small businesses do? 

Nadia Segura, directing attorney of the Small Business Program at pro bono legal aid non-profit Bet Tzedek said California law does not currently allow for rent control for commercial tenancies.

Outside of the protections under SB 1103, Segura said small businesses like READ Books don’t have much other recourse. And even then, commercial landlords are not required to inform their tenants of their protections under the law.

“There’s still a lot of people that don’t know about SB 1103. And then it’s very sad that they tell them they have these rent increases and within a month they have to leave,” Segura said.

She said her group is seeing steep rent hikes like this for commercial tenants across the city.

“We are seeing this even more with the World Cup coming up, the Olympics coming up. And I will say it was very sad to see that also after the wildfires,” Segura said.

Part of Bet Tzedek’s ongoing work is to advocate for small businesses, working with landlords who are increasing rents to see if they are willing to give business owners longer leases that lock in rents.

What’s next 

After READ Books posted about their situation on social media, commenters chimed in to express their outrage and love for the little shop.

While he looks for a new spot, Kaplan says he’s forming a coalition of local businesses and activist groups to see what can be done to help other small businesses facing similar displacement. He wants to address the displacement issue for businesses like his, which have made Eagle Rock the distinctive neighborhood that it is today.

Owl Talk, a longtime Eagle Rock staple selling clothing and accessories in a unit in the same building as READ Books, is facing a “more than double” rent increase, according to a post on their Instagram account.

Kaplan said he’s been in touch with the office of state Assemblywoman Jessica Caloza and wants to explore the possibility of introducing legislation to set up protections for small businesses like his, including rent-control measures or a vacancy tax for landlords. Kaplan said he also reached out to the office of state Sen. Maria Durazo.

By his count, Kaplan said there are about a dozen businesses within surrounding blocks that are at risk of closing their doors or have shuttered due to rent increases or other struggles.

When READ Books was founded during the Great Recession, Kaplan said he knew it was a longshot to open a bookstore at the same time so many were struggling to stay in business.

“It was kind of interesting to be doing something that neighborhoods needed. That was important to me growing up, that was important to my children, that was important to my wife growing up,” Kaplan said.

“And then somebody comes in and says, ‘We’re gonna over double your rent.”

Topline:

Frozen budget: Most of the city’s Bureau of Street Lighting budget comes from an assessment that people who own property illuminated by lights pay on their county property tax bill. The amount people pay depends on the kind of property they own and how much they benefit from lighting. A typical single-family home currently pays $53 annually, and in total, the assessments bring in about $45 million annually for the city to repair and maintain streetlights. Changing the amount the Bureau of Street Lighting gets from the assessment requires a vote among property owners who benefit from the lights.

Ballots: L.A. City Council’s vote gives city staff the green light to prepare and send out those ballots. Miguel Sangalang, who oversees the bureau, said at a committee meeting earlier this month that he expects to send out ballots by April 17. Notices about the ballots will be sent out prior to the ballots themselves.

Near unanimous vote: L.A. City Councilmember Monica Rodriguez was the only “No” vote Tuesday, saying she wanted to see a more current strategic plan for the bureau. Sangalang said the bureau developed a plan in 2022 that lays out how money will be spent. Councilmember Imelda Padilla was absent for the vote.

Vote count: Votes will be weighted according to the assessment amount. Basically, the more you’re asked to pay yearly to maintain streetlights, the more your vote will count. Ballots received before June 2 will be tabulated by the L.A. City Clerk.

How much more money: According to a report, the amount needed in assessments from property owners to meet the repair and maintenance needs of the city’s streetlighting in the next fiscal year is nearly $112 million.

Use of the money: Sangalang said at a March 11 committee meeting that the extra funds would be used to double the number of staff to handle repairs and procure solar streetlights, which don’t face the threat of copper wire theft. That would all potentially reduce the time it takes to repair simple fixes down to a week. Currently, city residents wait for months to see broken streetlights repaired. The assessment would come with a three-year auditing mechanism.