Los Angeles-area leaders, nonprofits and residents came together in outrage Monday in the wake of a Supreme Court ruling to grant a stay to a July restraining order temporarily barring immigration officers from conducting indiscriminate stops.

The Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision means Immigration and Customs Enforcement can resume in L.A. the raids and aggressive street sweeps that began in June to comply with President Donald Trump’s mass deportation agenda.

“Today’s Supreme Court ruling is another devastating attack on civil rights and constitutionality. Six Justices have given immigration agents the green light to racially profile and terrorize our communities with roving patrols,” said L.A. City Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez, who represents District 1, during a news conference outside a Home Depot in Westlake where immigration officers arrested numerous workers.

“You are sitting on the ground where people were tripped, trampled and beat up by these people,” Hernandez said to the crowd. “Tear gas was just right behind you, rubber bullets (and) pepper bullets were used in this area.”

The Supreme Court’s stay reverses the judgment in Vasquez Perdomo v. Noem that barred immigration officers from stopping individuals without reasonable suspicion and from “relying solely on four factors — alone or in combination — including apparent race or ethnicity; speaking Spanish or English with an accent; presence in a particular location like a bus stop, car wash, or agricultural site; or the type of work a person does,” according to a news release from the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California.

The legal push was set in motion in the weeks following June 18, when a handful of men, including Pedro Vasquez Perdomo, Carlos Alexander Osorto and Isaac Villegas Molina, were detained at a bus stop near Orange Grove Boulevard and Los Robles Avenue in Pasadena.

“SCOTUS’s stay is a win for the safety and security of the American people and the rule of law,” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said on X. “ Our brave @DHSGov law enforcement will continue our operations in L.A. to remove the worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens that pose a danger to public safety.”

Many Southern California leaders did not agree.

“With the stroke of a pen, the Supreme Court has undermined the rights of millions,” L.A. Mayor Karen Bass said Monday. “We know that this is simply un-American.”

Los Angeles County had seen waves of these types of raids in prior months. Prime locations have been big-box home-improvement stores such as Home Depot, the bustling MacArthur Park neighborhood and myriad open-air markets and car washes in communities across the region.

“As of today, approximately 81 car washes have been raided,” Flor Melendrez, executive director of the Clean Carwash Workers Center, said during Monday’s news conference. “Many of them, three or four times. Approximately 247 car wash workers have disappeared from our communities.”

Many of the speakers noted how lively and busy the area near the Westlake Home Depot used to be. But now it is empty, with no open-air stands or pop-up vendors, they said.

According to Pablo Alvarado, co-executive director of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, plaintiff and co-counsel in the case, the decision will stall construction, hospitality and other industries that rely on a workforce rich in migrants.

“It not just harm to immigrants,” he said. “It’s harm to the economy. You tell me how L.A.’s going to rebuild without a migrant workforce. Impossible.”

Attendees of the news conference cried in outrage, alleging that friends and family members are losing their livelihoods and homes.

“When ICE grabbed me, they never showed a warrant or explained why. I was treated like I didn’t matter—locked up, cold, hungry, and without a lawyer. Now, the Supreme Court says that’s okay? That’s not justice. That’s racism with a badge,” Vasquez Perdomo, one of the named plaintiffs in the case, said in a statement. “I joined this case because what happened to me is happening to others everyday just for being brown, speaking Spanish, or standing on a corner looking for work. The system failed us today, but I’m not staying silent. We’ll keep fighting because our lives are important.”

Other plaintiffs include Armando Gudino of the Los Angeles Worker Center Network, Angelica Salas of The Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, Alvaro Huerta of the Immigrant Defenders Law Center and Elizabeth Strater of United Farm Workers.

Strater emphasized the discrimination farmworkers are facing in the area.

“We’ve talked to farmworkers who have been washing their cars every day after work because they don’t want their car to look like a farmworker’s,” Melendrez said. “They don’t want any dust or mud from the field on their car. They think about how they’re dressed so they don’t look like a farmworker.”

The Department of Homeland Security said earlier this month that more than 5,000 immigration arrests had been made in L.A. since June 6.

“The officers are instructed to find reasonable suspicion before an arrest,” a U.S. Department of Justice attorney told the appeals panel in oral arguments in front of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in August.

The agency said in a statement Monday that its teams plan to “continue to FLOOD THE ZONE in Los Angeles.” The region has been a top priority for the Trump administration, and its hard-line immigration strategy has spurred widespread protests. Trump responded by deploying the National Guard and Marines to the city’s streets.

Trump and his administration have long argued that the nation is witnessing an “invasion” of immigrants, with particular ire toward President Joe Biden’s administration, which reversed many of the tough immigration policies of Trump’s first term.

The Trump administration stands behind its immigration strategy, declaring it is ridding the nation of the “worst of the worst” criminal immigrants who are in the nation illegally.

Melendrez and others say Immigration and Customs Enforcement is no longer solely targeting people with criminal records and undocumented immigrants at this point. More than 70% of those who have been detained in recent months across the country have never been convicted of a crime, according to the Deportation Data Project.

“We know that there are citizens who are also collateral damage and there’s a point where you have to realize that when any one demographic begins to lose their very most basic rights that this country was founded on, once those rights begin to erode for one group, they begin to erode for everyone,” Melendrez said. “So when it happens to them, watch, because it will happen to you.”

In response to the Supreme Court’s decision, Bass ordered all her departments to comply with the city’s law prohibiting the use of city resources to assist in immigration enforcement. She has also submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to the federal government to provide information on where people are being taken and why.

“Today’s decision endorses and enables Trump’s authoritarian attacks on immigrants,” Alvarado said. “What happens next is up to all of us. The legal system is failing. But we, the people, must not fail. We call on all people of good will to show up for and with immigrant workers. To stand with day laborers, car wash workers, farmworkers and all other immigrants who are working to keep this country running, even as they are now terrorized by Trump.”

The ACLU assured the community that they will be continuing with an injunction to ensure that the case continues as a class-action lawsuit. The case will go in front of the District Court in downtown L.A. on Sept. 24.

Staff writers Kaitlyn Schallhorn, Ryan Carter, Allyson Vergara, Mona Darwish and David Wilson, The Associated Press and City News Service contributed to this report.