Frimpong Crimping ICE
12th August 2025
Power Line.
Last month This past California Federal District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong issued a temporary restraining order more or less preventing ICE from operating in California’s Central District — the covering the seven counties of Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, and Ventura. The counties’ population of nearly 20 million people is the largest of any federal judicial district in the country. I wrote about Judge Frimpong’s crimping of ICE in posts that are accessible here.
“Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong” sure says “American” to me…
Heather Mac Donald takes up the case and the mysteries of Judge Frimpong herself in the City Journal column “Using a Double Standard on Race to Handicap ICE.” Subhead: “A federal judge ruled that agents impermissibly used race in questioning suspected illegal aliens—but she’s hardly color-blind in her own courtroom.” As one would expect from Ms. Mac Donald, it is an excellent column.
Mac Donald links to what she calls the government’s “emergency appeal” to the Supreme Court. The linked document is actually styled an application for a stay. The procedural background is addressed at pages 8-14. The government discusses the Ninth Circuit’s disposition of its request for relief, but it’s not clear to me that the Ninth Circuit even had appellate jurisdiction over Judge Frimpong’s temporary restraining order.