The warrantless arrests of 11 immigrant restaurant workers in Liberty earlier this year violated a 2022 consent decree, a federal judge ruled.
The arrests of the workers at El Potro Mexican Café in February were among the first in the Kansas City area to draw widespread media attention.
The Liberty cases became part of a broader filing, challenging government tactics under the second Trump administration on behalf of 26 immigrant plaintiffs.
The case did not question the government’s right to make arrests on immigration violations. But it questioned whether it had violated the prior consent agreement by making warrantless arrests.
On Oct. 7, a federal judge for the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division, ruled in favor of the immigrant workers.
Judge Jeffrey I. Cummings ordered U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to lift any conditions on the release of 22 immigrants, including 11 people who had been detained after the Liberty raid.
The other 11 people were detained in Chicago through warrantless arrests in their neighborhood or vehicles, according to the National Immigrant Justice Center, which helped bring the case.
The decision has far-reaching implications and is a huge win for due process, said Rekha Sharma-Crawford, a Kansas City-based immigration attorney representing the Liberty workers.
The Liberty restaurant workers now are out on bond, an option that has become nearly impossible in recent months for detainees taken into ICE custody.
“Their deportation cases, at least for the time being, would have to be dismissed because they were all arrested unlawfully,” Sharma-Crawford said.
In addition to Missouri and Kansas, Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin and Kentucky are also under the consent decree, known for the name of one of the original plaintiffs, Margarito Castañon Nava.
Cummings also ordered the Department of Homeland Security to reissue its warrantless arrest policy nationwide and certify that any officers who violated the consent decree were retrained.
Also, ICE will need to report to the court the names and arrest documents for anyone else who had been arrested without a warrant on immigration violations since June in the Northern District of Illinois, and to continue making similar reports monthly.
In some of the cases, federal officials were accused of creating warrants after they had already arrested the individuals on the civil violations of being without lawful immigration or citizenship status.
Cummings also extended the consent decree to Feb. 2, 2026.
It had been set to expire May 12, 2025, had further violations not been found.
The date change “corresponds to the number of days between the date that ICE unequivocally ceased its compliance with the Agreement (June 11, 2025) and the date of this Memorandum Opinion and Order to provide plaintiffs with the full three-year term of the Agreement for which they bargained,” according to the judge’s ruling.
The Department of Homeland Security also was ordered to pay the plaintiffs’ attorney fees.
The case was brought by the National Immigrant Justice Center and the Roger Baldwin Foundation of the ACLU of Illinois.
“Today’s decision makes clear that DHS and ICE — like everyone else — must follow the Constitution and the law,” said ACLU of Illinois Deputy Legal Director Michelle Garcia, co-counsel, in a statement.
“The federal government’s reckless practice of stopping, harassing and detaining people — and then finding a justification for the action must end,” Garcia said. “The Trump administration’s destructive mass deportation scheme is not a reason to toss aside bedrock constitutional principles, disregard federal law or court orders.”
The ruling comes as the federal government ramps up the presence of immigration agents in Chicago, and President Donald Trump is threatening to send in the National Guard to maintain order in the face of protests in Portland.
The Department of Homeland Security has not issued a statement yet on the court’s decision.
The Liberty workers were detained after more than a dozen agents with Homeland Security Investigations entered the restaurant looking for a worker suspected of a child sex crime.
But communication problems, possibly exacerbated by language barriers, led to the federal agents entering a private office space, despite the lack of a warrant, and collecting employment documents.
Twelve workers were handcuffed and detained. One of the immigrants was later removed from the U.S.
The judgment is being noted by local immigrant rights advocates as an example of strategic legal filings designed to force the government to stay within the law.
More than 3,000 people in the Kansas City area have been trained in know-your-rights sessions by Advocates for Immigrant Rights and Reconciliation, or AIRR.
During the training, an emphasis is placed on witnesses filming federal agents during a raid to document that policies and the law are being followed, rather than focusing on the immigrants.
AIRR also stresses that witnesses refrain from name-calling of federal agents, as such video might be necessary to submit in cases like the one just decided in the Illinois court.
This story was originally published by The Beacon, a fellow member of the KC Media Collective.
