A federal judge in Los Angeles has told both sides where she is leaning, and the distinction between where she is leaning and what she has actually ordered is the whole story. On Thursday, August 13, U.S. District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong issued a tentative ruling indicating she is inclined to grant a preliminary injunction that would restrict warrantless immigration arrests across Los Angeles [1]. A tentative ruling is not a binding order. No injunction is in force, and the arrests the judge is inclined to restrict can continue while the ruling is not final.
That is the correction worth making up front, because a tentative ruling reads in a headline like a done deal and is not one. What Frimpong signaled is that she may require federal agents to obtain, in her words, "individualized, pre-arrest probable cause determinations of flight risk" before making a warrantless arrest [1]. The scope she is weighing is broad: the city and the areas surrounding Los Angeles, home to 19 million people [1].
The standard, if she finalizes it, would draw a line around who can be treated as a flight risk. People who have longstanding ties to the community, U.S.-born children and spouses, and long-term homes in the Los Angeles area would not likely be considered by a court to be a flight risk, unless they have serious criminal records [1]. In practice that describes a large share of the people who have been swept up.
This follows the same judge's ruling two days earlier. As we reported when Judge Frimpong let the Los Angeles immigration-raids lawsuit go forward, on Tuesday, August 12, she denied the Department of Homeland Security's motion to dismiss, holding that "the accusations are enough for this case to go forward at this time" [2]. Surviving dismissal kept the case alive; Thursday's tentative ruling is the first signal of how she may rule on the request to actually halt the tactics. The plaintiffs include five individual Latino workers, the Los Angeles Worker Center Network, United Farm Workers, the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, and the Immigrant Defenders Law Center, who sued DHS in July 2025 over its stop-and-detention practices [2].
The record the judge is drawing from is specific. The ACLU and Public Counsel analyzed 113 arrest narratives produced as discovery in the case and found that nearly 80% contained either no escape-risk assessment or used boilerplate language [1]. That is the evidentiary spine of the flight-risk standard she is weighing: if the arrest paperwork rarely documents an individualized flight-risk judgment, then a rule requiring one changes how the arrests are made.
One declaration in the record puts a person behind the paperwork. A man identified only as D.V.V., detained at the Adelanto ICE Processing Center in San Bernardino County, said he was pressured multiple times to sign a form he did not understand. "I asked to see the form. The second time, the officers took me to a meeting room where a man told me they would force me to sign if I refused to sign," he wrote in a declaration submitted under penalty of perjury [1]. He is one of the people a finalized injunction would cover, and one of the people it does not cover yet.
That is where this stands. The judge has signaled she may require agents to justify warrantless arrests one person at a time before making them, and she has kept the lawsuit alive to get there. Neither of those is an order stopping the arrests. Until the tentative ruling becomes final, the campaign it addresses continues across the same 19 million-person region, and the gap between what the court is inclined to do and what it has done is measured in the arrests made in between.
