Judge finds Border Patrol defied her injunction with boilerplate forms in Sacramento arrests

In an order unsealed on April 1, 2026, U.S. District Judge Jennifer Thurston of the Eastern District of California found that U.S. Border Patrol agents had defied her April 2025 preliminary injunction in United Farm Workers v. Noem. That injunction — issued after enforcement sweeps in Kern County during "Operation Return to Sender" — barred agents from detaining people without documented reasonable suspicion of an immigration violation and from making warrantless arrests without first finding probable cause that the person posed a flight risk.

The violation centered on a July 2025 enforcement action at a Sacramento Home Depot, where agents detained a group of day laborers and arrested 12 people: 11 noncitizens and one U.S. citizen. The judge found that agents supported the detentions and arrests with eleven essentially identical, boilerplate I-213 forms that relied on broad conclusory statements — such as the assertion that noncitizens "regularly gather" at such businesses — rather than the individualized, articulable facts her injunction required. She wrote that even accepting the government's claim that those arrested fled from agents, unprovoked flight "standing alone" cannot establish reasonable suspicion, and that the form narratives "fail to bridge this gap." Plaintiffs argued agents had targeted the workers by apparent ethnicity and occupation; a government attorney conceded agents lacked reasonable suspicion when they entered the parking lot.

Granting in part the United Farm Workers' motion to enforce the injunction, Judge Thurston ordered agents to write a narrative report for each stop documenting the facts supporting reasonable suspicion, signed and dated under an attestation that the contents are true and correct. The ruling is a formal judicial finding that a federal agency failed to comply with a binding court order — legal experts noted that continued noncompliance could escalate to fines or contempt proceedings.