In a decision on Wednesday, a federal judge in Los Angeles this week ordered U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement working within L.A. to stop using so-called knock-and-talk tactics, a method for immigration arrests in which field officers enter a property without a judicial warrant or consent, then arrest undocumented immigrants when they come to the door, Courthouse News reported. U.S. District Judge Otis Wright II said the practice amounts to "knock-and-arrest" and violates Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures. He noted that while officers pretended that they only wanted to talk when they knocked, the real purpose was making immigration arrests.
A group of migrants in 2020 had filed a class action over these methods. In addition to challenging knock-and-talk tactics, the migrants in their suit also called out ICE field officers for pretending to be police or probation officers for the purpose of making arrests. The plaintiffs and ICE last year agreed to settle the latter so-called ruse claims — leaving only the knock-and-talk claims to proceed to summary judgment. According to a plaintiff expert witness cited in Wright's ruling, knock-and-talks accounted for at least 27% of residential arrests for the period during which data was available, including at least 8% of all arrests in 2022.
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