Judge Finds Border Patrol Violated Order in Home Depot Raid

The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California found that U.S. Customs and Border Protection violated a prior order when Border Patrol agents swept a Sacramento Home Depot parking lot and made warrantless arrests during a July 17, 2025 immigration operation.

U.S. District Judge Jennifer L. Thurston said the operation at the Florin Road store in south Sacramento crossed the line she had already drawn in April 2025, when she barred Border Patrol from stopping people without individualized reasonable suspicion and from making warrantless arrests unless agents had probable cause to believe someone might flee. Court records say agents detained 11 noncitizens and one U.S. citizen in the Home Depot lot, a place where day laborers had gathered looking for work.

The judge’s enforcement ruling said the Sacramento operation violated that injunction because agents lacked reasonable suspicion for the people they targeted. Court filings said the government conceded at a February hearing that agents did not have reasonable suspicion that any particular person swept up in the raid was unlawfully in the country. The court also found the agents leaned on generalized assumptions about day laborers and on flight alone, instead of specific facts tied to each individual.

The ruling went further on paperwork and accountability. The court found the documentation supporting the stops and arrests was deficient and, in some cases, inaccurate. To tighten compliance, Thurston ordered each agent to personally document the facts supporting any stop and directed Border Patrol to avoid boilerplate, copied, or modified reports. For workers and managers at retail sites, the message is that a parking lot used by contractors or day laborers is not open season for broad sweeps. Enforcement still can happen, but the court said it must be tied to individualized suspicion and supported by real, agent-specific facts.

The Sacramento case is part of United Farm Workers v. Noem and comes out of a broader challenge to what filings describe as Operation At Large, a nationwide Border Patrol campaign. The April injunction grew out of a January 2025 sweep in Kern County that included a Home Depot parking lot and other locations.

Worker advocates said the latest ruling confirmed that agents cannot rely on generic narratives or racialized assumptions. United Farm Workers President Teresa Romero said the Sacramento raid, like earlier operations in Bakersfield and Kern County, was unconstitutional and that workers are safer when they stand together to defend one another.