Warrant for immigration raid wrongly sought via 'judge-shopping,' Texas judge says

By Nate Raymond

June 11 (Reuters) - A federal judge in Texas said the Trump administration sought to "blatantly judge-shop" to evade a ruling he had issued rejecting its request for a warrant that would allow U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to raid a business to detain migrants who are not authorized to work in the U.S.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Andrew Edison in Galveston leveled that claim in an opinion published on Monday in a fight over the ability of immigration authorities to use administrative inspection warrants to conduct roundups of migrants who are in U.S. illegally working at private businesses.

ICE agents sought to conduct the search as the agency ramps up efforts to deliver on U.S. President Donald Trump's promise of record-level deportations.

The type of warrants at issue are commonly referred to as "Blackie’s warrants," a name derived from a 1981 decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia that first permitted their use to search businesses for unauthorized migrant workers.

For immigration authorities, the advantage of a Blackie's warrant is that the government does not need to specifically identify the workers being sought but only state that a plausible basis exists to believe that there are individuals in the country illegally present at the location being searched.

But Edison in a May 27 decision that he made public in an otherwise sealed case concluded that the legal basis for the 1981 ruling and subsequent decisions blessing Blackie's warrants had shifted and that they cannot be deemed lawful.

He said administrative inspection warrants traditionally allow federal regulatory agencies to enter a business to inspect records or to search for safety hazards. "People are not documents or safety hazards," Edison said.

And while in 1981 a business faced no criminal exposure for employing migrants who were in the country illegally, the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 which then U.S. President Ronald Reagan signed into law, introduced civil and criminal penalties for employers who knowingly hire them, Edison said.

As a result, Blackie's warrants issued after 1986 allow the search of private property where the business owner potentially faces criminal penalties without meeting the requirements for a warrant in a criminal case, which must state with particularity what is being searched and seized, Edison said.

"That simply cannot be right," Edison wrote.

A spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney's Office declined to comment. ICE did not respond to a request for comment on Wednesday.

Edison also said the warrant's breadth rendered it a general warrant that violated the U.S. Constitution's Fourth Amendment.

In reaching that conclusion, Edison cited a ruling by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals last year which had held that "geofence" warrants used by law enforcement to identify suspects in a specified geographic area were likewise unconstitutional.

Rather than ask Edison to reconsider or seek to appeal his ruling, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of Texas on June 4 submitted a nearly identical warrant application, this time to U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Brown.

The Trump administration also asked Brown, a Trump appointee, to seal the magistrate judge's earlier ruling, saying it should have remained sealed.

The new application, though, wound up again before Edison, who described the government's contention that his opinion and the legal analysis it contained that was applicable to any business anywhere as "quite alarming."

"The judiciary’s work should not be done in the shadows," Edison wrote.

He said the government had gone to Brown "hoping that it would receive approval of its application devoid of any legal precedent."

"This it cannot do," Edison wrote, as he rejected the second warrant application.