No Bond, No Burden, No Bother: Lawfare Hits ICE in California, Again
By Charlton Allen www.americanthinker.com
When federal courts issue emergency orders—like temporary restraining orders (TROs) or preliminary injunctions—Rule 65(c) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure imposes a clear requirement:
The court may issue a preliminary injunction or a temporary restraining order only if the movant gives security in an amount that the court considers proper to pay the costs and damages sustained by any party found to have been wrongfully enjoined or restrained [emphasis added].
But in Vasquez-Perdomo v. Noem, Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong—a Biden appointee in the Central District of California—blithely casts this requirement aside.
No bond. No substantive cost analysis. Just a sweeping TRO and a shrug.
And in doing so, Judge Frimpong left a hole so yawning you could cruise a 1941 Packard Clipper through it—with the doors flung open and the hood up—and that’s saying something, since the 1941 Clipper was the widest car in production at the time and the first American automobile deliberately engineered to be wider than it was tall.
According to the court, there was “no realistic likelihood of harm” to the government. The order, she reasoned, merely compels ICE to comply with its existing attorney visitation protocols and applicable law.
That framing is surgically precise in what it considers—and what it ignores.
This TRO isn’t a procedural pause button—what most TROs are used for—it’s a tactical rewire of how ICE conducts field operations in the LA metro area.
It imposes sweeping restrictions: narrowing what officers may consider in forming reasonable suspicion, limiting where and how they operate, and mandating new documentation protocols—all under the court’s supervision and opposing counsel’s review.
That’s far beyond adherence to internal agency policy. It’s micromanagement by judicial decree, and it’s all shared with activist NGOs and other adversarial parties in this case.
Judge Frimpong zooms in on just one narrow aspect—access to legal counsel—and relegates the government’s broader objections to a flatly dismissive footnote. “There is no realistic likelihood of harm to Defendants from requiring them to permit legal visitations in a manner consistent with their existing schedules,” she writes.
However, that selective framing overlooks the operational burdens her order imposes elsewhere, including standards of suspicion, field logistics, and enforcement discretion.
And that’s the crux of the contradiction—and the problem it creates here.
If a TRO imposes no substantive new burden on the defendant, then the justification for emergency relief—typically the prevention of imminent harm—falls apart. If it does—and it clearly does here—then Rule 65(c) demands a bond.
The government requested a $30 million bond to offset potential damages. The court completely brushed this aside with no real analysis at all, asserting that requiring compliance with “existing schedules” eliminates the possibility of harm.
But that’s not how Rule 65(c) works. Not even close.
While courts retain discretion in setting the bond amount, they have no discretion to disregard the requirement entirely—let alone overlook the substantial new obligations their own orders impose on an agency.
Once a TRO imposes burdens that carry a realistic risk of cost or disruption—as this one plainly does—the court must require some security.
Instead, Judge Frimpong sidesteps the true scope of her own injunction by focusing on attorney visitation. It’s as if the rest of the order—field restrictions, suspicion standards, and mandatory reporting—do not exist.
But they do exist—because the order created them. And that matters.
This TRO imposes extensive field-level constraints on ICE operations in one of the country’s largest urban areas.
It alters how officers assess encounters, limits their ability to act on credible leads, and subjects them to third-party oversight—reporting requirements designed to be shared with opposing counsel. These are intrusive restrictions on core enforcement activities, and they certainly aren’t cost-free.
The case is now on appeal before the Ninth Circuit, and Judge Frimpong has ordered the parties to confer on whether the TRO is immediately appealable and whether such an appeal divests the district court of jurisdiction. Those are important questions.
But the damage is already underway. The circus that followed—in legacy media, on social platforms, and across advocacy networks—would have you believe this order was a triumph for constitutionalism.
Spoiler: it’s not. And not just because of the gaping bond issue. More on that soon.
But for now, this order stands—broad in reach, thin on justification, and insulated from financial accountability by a bond denial built on selective framing and a narrow slice of a much larger burden.
The appellate courts will face a pivotal test with this case. Judge Frimpong’s order stretches the bounds of judicial authority, invites operational chaos, and evades the statutory safeguards built into Rule 65(c). In a post-Trump v. CASA world, that’s a dangerous precedent.
Stay tuned.
And by the way, Andrea Widburg’s excellent post at American Thinker offers a clear and compelling critique of Judge Frimpong’s order, highlighting how it handcuffs ICE and reshapes immigration enforcement from the bench. This column complements her analysis by digging deeper into one of the numerous flaws at the heart of the TRO.
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