Federal judge rules ICE arrests of KC-area restaurant workers were unlawful

A federal judge ruled this week that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers violated a legal order that was in place when they arrested 11 workers at a Mexican restaurant near Kansas City in February.

The judge found that ICE agents did not meet the required legal standards for warrantless arrests when they detained the workers at El Potro in Liberty, meaning the arrests were unlawful.

Beyond just that finding, the ruling extends the terms of the order that ICE violated to February 2026, making it harder to arrest someone in Kansas City and the Midwest region without a warrant until then.

“It is a ruling that says there’s a settlement in place, these are the rules that you all agreed to and that you deliberately and knowingly violated those rules,” said Rekha Sharma-Crawford, a local immigration attorney.

In March, the National Immigrant Justice Center (NIJC) — a nonprofit that provides legal services, policy advocacy and litigation on behalf of immigrants — claimed that ICE violated a legal settlement agreement around warrantless arrests after recent raids in the agency’s Chicago region of operations — which includes Illinois, Wisconsin, Indiana, Kentucky, Missouri and Kansas.

The settlement agreement stemmed from a lawsuit filed during President Donald Trump’s first term in 2018 when ICE conducted enforcement sweeps that involved arresting bystanders in addition to specific individuals who had warrants.

The lawsuit challenged the legality of making such sweeping arrests and raised the legal bar for when immigration officers in the Midwest region can arrest someone without a warrant by pulling language from the Immigration and Nationality Act — which allows the agency to make a warrantless arrest only if they have probable cause that the person is likely to escape before a warrant could be issued.

When Trump took office again in 2024, the NIJC started to see “rampant and frankly escalating violations” of that agreement — including in Liberty — prompting the nonprofit to sue over ICE’s conduct, said Mark Fleming, the NIJC’s associate director of litigation.

“The judge agreed with us, that indeed, the administration in its enforcement here in the Midwest has conducted rampant, material violations of the consent decree, and in doing that the judge has now extended the consent decree — at least now — until February 2, 2026,” he said.

ICE officials did not provide a comment before publication.

The Liberty raid and federal ruling

In February, about 15 agents from Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), a branch of ICE, showed up at El Potro just before lunchtime, claiming that they were looking for someone who was a registered child sex offender, according to the ruling.

“The owner, who observed approximately 15 officers, did not feel that he could refuse the officer’s request and he told the officers that they could set up in one of the open concept dining rooms,” the ruling said. “The officers proceeded to do so and an officer asked the owner if he could bring his employees in one at a time.”

“The owner then brought in his employees and did not tell them that they had the option not to speak with the ICE agents.”

Yadira De La Torre, whose parents own El Potro, declined to comment at this time.

According to the ruling, security footage confirms that employees entered the dining room one at a time, had brief interactions with agents, and certain employees were seated in booths within the dining room with “armed agents at each entry/exit to the room.”

Employees were held in the booths for nearly two hours before they were handcuffed and escorted out of the restaurant, according to court documents.

Agents had the regulatory authority to “briefly detain” employees at the restaurant for questioning if they had suspicion that they were unlawfully in the U.S. However, a detention that lasted multiple hours “was not brief” and the owner nor anyone else informed employees that they were free to leave or had the option to decline to answer any questions, the ruling said.

“Here, the evidence shows that the employees would have reasonably believed that they were not free to leave after they were questioned by the armed ICE officers and seated in the dining room,” the ruling said.

What happens next?

Once immigration authorities arrest someone, removal proceedings can begin, said Rekha Sharma-Crawford, an immigration attorney who represents the 12 who were detained in Liberty.

Typically, individuals would go before an immigration judge, but all proceedings for the Liberty workers have been put on pause until the federal judge issued his ruling, she said.

“The immigration judge was awaiting a final ruling from the federal court, in particular, because the federal court is best kind of postured to do exactly what it did here with this: To hold an evidentiary hearing, to look at evidence, take into consideration testimony from both sides,” Sharma-Crawford said.

Aside from one individual who had a previous removal order, the judge found the remaining 11 arrests breached the settlement agreement.

The remaining 11 were released on bond and the NIJC is working to reimburse those families at this time.

“Warrantless arrests without probable cause or procedure is a faulty start to the process. I can’t speak for the judge, but they will listen to the arguments — but it’s a false start,” she said. “Just like in football, when you have a false start it doesn’t count.”

What about the other raids?

The NIJC’s initial motion presented 26 violations. As they argued in court, the nonprofit gathered more than 200 potential violations, Fleming said.

The nonprofit is continuing to document further violations and working to find remedies for other individuals across the country — including a referral from a raid this summer at the El Toro Loco Mexican restaurant in Lenexa.

“It doesn’t need to be just in the last couple months, but basically any arrest that was made in the community where there wasn’t an order of removal,” Fleming with the NIJC said. “I can’t say they’re all violations, but there is — based on the decision, and what we had argued in the court agreed with us — a lot of those are probably violations.”

In July, at least four workers at the El Toro Loco restaurant were detained by HSI agents, who left behind a copy of a warrant signed by a judge authorizing them to seize records and documents “relating to harboring, human smuggling or labor exploitation.”

The warrant did not name any individuals arrested.

However, the circumstances between Liberty and Lenexa are different because of the judicial warrant issued in Lenexa, Sharma-Crawford said.

“Now, their judicial warrant was a search warrant,” she said. “Does that mean and does that give them carte blanche to go in and engage in unlawful arrests? No, but I think if you are going to do an apples-to-apples comparison, there is a factual distinction, right?”

While she’s not as intimately involved with the Lenexa raids this summer, a judicial warrant dictates the parameters of what is authorized and it’s usually based on the assurances that are made to the federal court that demonstrates why authorities requested a warrant.

Anyone can visit the NIJC website to file a possible violation of the settlement agreement.

This story was originally published October 10, 2025 at 5:42 AM.