Eight cities and Los Angeles County announced on Tuesday that they’re joining a lawsuit against President Donald Trump’s administration, calling federal agents’ tactics “unconstitutional,” and arguing that they’re more meant to instill fear than to protect the public.
Los Angeles County and the cities of Los Angeles, Santa Monica, Culver City, Pasadena, Pico Rivera, Montebello, Monterey Park and West Hollywood announced they were joining the lawsuit on Tuesday.
The lawsuit accuses the Trump administration, including Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, Attorney General Pam Bondi and more, of violating the Fourth and Fifth amendments to the Constitution. The lawsuit calls the recent immigration raids across Southern California “unconstitutional,” saying that agents regularly fail to identify themselves and racially profile targets, arresting them without warrants or probable cause.
“These unconstitutional roundups and raids cannot be allowed to continue,” LA City Attorney Hydee Feldstein Soto said. “They cannot become the new normal. This cannot become routine, to send militarized troops into our streets without reasonable suspicion, without probable cause to round people up and take them away.”
On Monday, a swarm of armed federal agents descended on MacArthur Park in downtown LA, with officials on horseback and in armored vehicles sweeping the park, shutting down a children’s summer camp in the process. No one was arrested.
Local leaders called the operation “an extraordinary escalation and an apparently completely performative show of force.”
LA Mayor Karen Bass said federal agents’ tactics threaten public safety. In several raids across the region, agents were reported to pull up in cars without license plates, with their faces covered and no clear identification.
“How do we know the difference between this and a kidnapping,” Bass asked.
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