Since August 2025, the District of Columbia has fallen into chaos as agents of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) have flooded the streets of the nation’s capital, indiscriminately arresting District residents whom the agents perceive to be Latino without warrants and without probable cause. Residents have been arrested discriminatorily based on their apparent ethnicity, then sent to immigration detention centers.

Cato, joined by Fair and Just Prosecution and the Law Enforcement Action Partnership, filed an amicus brief at the D.C. Circuit defending an injunction against these practices. Color-coded campaigns of official harassment are unconstitutional. The Fourth Amendment requires immigration arrests to be based on probable cause. DHS has unconstitutionally subjected individuals to violent stops and seizures based on nothing more than ethnicity or occupation. These operations have devastated public confidence in law enforcement, setting immigrant communities and local police at odds and so compromising public safety in the process. The ensuing distortion of law enforcement priorities has also been profound: thousands of state and federal officials have been pulled away from operations targeting terrorism, child exploitation, and human smuggling in order to smoke out low-level immigration violations.

Absent the preliminary injunction, federal agents will be able to resume arresting Latinos without probable cause, violating their constitutional protection against unreasonable searches and seizures and their right to due process and equal protection under the law.

Washington, D.C. is the capital of the free world. The injunction advances the Fourth and Fifth Amendment values that make it worthy of that role, as well as the respect for law enforcement that keeps it safe. It stops the federal government from arresting people on account of what they look like or where its agents believe people came from. It should be kept in place.