Judge to Hear Arguments Thursday in Immigration Stops Case Brought by Pasadena Men

Three named plaintiffs were arrested at a Pasadena bus stop in June 2025; the city moved to intervene in the case.

A federal judge in Los Angeles is scheduled to hear arguments Thursday, Sept. 24, on whether to bar immigration agents from stopping people without individualized suspicion, in a case whose named plaintiffs include three Pasadena men.

The hearing in Vasquez Perdomo v. Mullin is set for 10 a.m. Thursday, Sept. 24, before U.S. District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong.

Civil rights organizations say they will hold a rally and news conference at 8:30 a.m. outside the courthouse.

The plaintiffs’ motion asks the court to stop federal agents from making detentive stops anywhere in the Central District of California without a pre-stop assessment of reasonable suspicion about the person being stopped. It also asks the judge to bar agents from relying on someone’s perceived Latino ethnicity unless it matches a known target description. The motion seeks documentation requirements as well, and the plaintiffs say they are separately moving to certify two classes. The district covers Los Angeles County, so an injunction would reach Pasadena.

Pedro Vasquez Perdomo, Carlos Alexander Osorto and Isaac Villegas Molina, three of the five individual plaintiffs, were arrested June 18, 2025, at a Pasadena bus stop while waiting to be picked up for work. The city has its own role in the case. In July 2025, Pasadena joined Los Angeles County and seven other cities in moving to intervene. It said then that it had seen an “unprecedented increase” in federal enforcement activity, and that its police officers were being pulled away to determine whether masked, unidentified men in unmarked vehicles were federal agents. The court granted intervention on July 29, 2025, and the cities and the county have remained parties to the case.

The 40-page motion, filed July 27, draws on months of expedited discovery, including agent depositions, internal messages and body-worn camera video. It argues that enforcement is driven by apparent ethnicity and perceived working-class status rather than individualized investigation. Describing the Pasadena arrests, the motion says officers claimed to be looking for a specific target but never returned to search for that person. It also says the lead officer, asked what the men he treats as suspicious look like, answered, “Older Hispanic males.” Those are the plaintiffs’ characterizations, and the court has not ruled on them.

Government lawyers have contested the claims throughout the litigation. In August 2025 Supreme Court filings, quoted in the plaintiffs’ motion, they argued that ethnicity was one factor among several and that the stops were brief. Opposing a related injunction in the district court, they wrote that the government has “a significant and compelling interest in the steady enforcement of its immigration laws,” and that Los Angeles remains a priority for enforcement.

Rulings have gone both ways. The Supreme Court stayed Frimpong’s July 2025 restraining order in September 2025 without explanation, and the judge has since written that it is impossible to know the basis for the majority’s order. On Sept. 2, she granted in part a separate injunction over warrantless arrests. She found the plaintiffs likely to succeed in showing that agents were arresting people without first weighing whether they would escape before a warrant could be obtained. She had taken that motion under submission after an Aug. 13 hearing and ruled about three weeks later.