How a Gambling Warrant Could Change Immigration Enforcement Authority

On a Sunday afternoon in October 2025, hundreds of community members from the majority Latino city of Wilder, Idaho, poured into the La Catedral horse racetrack for a popular weekly event with horse racing, Mexican food vendors, music, and family-friendly games. In the weeks prior, the FBI had obtained warrants to arrest five individuals—including the racetrack’s owner—for allegedly gambling without a license, along with a warrant to search portions of the property related to the gambling. The investigators executed those warrants on that Sunday.

What unfolded, however, bore little resemblance to a typical search and arrest for nonviolent gambling offenses. As the attendees began to gather for lunch, 200 federal, state, and local officers descended on the property, armed with guns and tactical gear, with helicopters and drones overhead. The consortium of law enforcement officers detained 400 adults and children, the majority of whom were citizens or lawful residents, hours after those accused of gambling violations were taken into custody until their citizenship status could be verified. Detainees were reportedly grouped based on perceived ethnicity; Latino-appearing attendees were allegedly denied water, referred to as “monsters,” and treated with more physical aggression than their lighter-skinned counterparts.

A punitive class-action lawsuit, Rodriguez, et al. v. Porter, et al., filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in the U.S. District Court for the District of Idaho in February, contends that law enforcement used the existence of the gambling warrants as a pretext to illegally target and detain Latino families and violate their civil rights. The plaintiffs have turned to an unconventional statutory tool to support their case: Reconstruction-era conspiracy statutes originally enacted to combat the Ku Klux Klan.

As large-scale immigration raids have increased, so too have questions around the limits of Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE’s) authority in the absence of individualized warrants. Federal immigration officers, including ICE agents, are generally permitted to detain individuals either (a) pursuant to a warrant for a specific, named individual (whether authorized via a judicial or administrative warrant) or (b) if there is a reasonable suspicion that a person is in the United States illegally and likely to escape before a warrant can be obtained. When executing a search warrant, officers may briefly detain occupants of the premises to secure the scene and ensure officer safety. If, in the course of executing a valid warrant, officers develop individualized reasonable suspicion as to additional persons, collateral arrests are permissible. 

Public statements from federal officials suggest that the Idaho operation was formally justified only by the criminal gambling warrant, not by an administrative or judicial warrant for immigration enforcement. The FBI labeled it a 200-person, cross-agency effort targeting illegal gambling. An ICE spokesperson made no mention of immigration enforcement when describing the effort either, stating instead that “ICE dismantled an illegal horse-racing, animal fighting, and gambling enterprise operation.” (The criminal complaint against the track’s owner does not allege animal fighting and indicates that La Catedral had a valid horse-racing permit.) Jenn Rolnick Borchetta, the chief attorney for the plaintiffs, told Lawfare that “if there was an ICE warrant, I think we would’ve known by now.”

If immigration officers lacked independent warrant authority, the mass detention would be justified in only two ways: as incidental to executing the gambling warrants or on the basis of individualized reasonable suspicion. Both appear difficult to reconcile with the alleged facts.

The Supreme Court permits temporary detention of occupants during the execution of a search warrant to ensure officer safety, prevent the destruction of evidence, and facilitate an orderly search. Typically, those detained would be released once those needs have been met. In this case, authorities detained roughly 400 attendees for hours, releasing them one by one once they could produce proof of citizenship. That individuals were released only after their citizenship status could be verified undermines the claim that continued detention for others was necessary to complete the search of the grounds.

The justification for the raid would then have to rest on reasonable suspicion. What constitutes reasonable suspension is broad and currently in flux. Ethnicity alone, the Supreme Court has made clear, cannot constitute reasonable suspicion. In September 2025, however, the Court temporarily stayed a federal district court order that had barred ICE from conducting investigative stops premised on an individual’s apparent race or ethnicity; if they spoke Spanish or English with an accent; presence at certain locations, such as bus stops, car washes, or agricultural sites; or if they worked in particular forms of day labor. The Supreme Court’s stay has allowed agents to continue swarming Home Depots and landscaping businesses, among other locations, to conduct mass detentions absent individual warrants.

If the full force of a 200-person, multiagency raid was in place from the outset, and all attendees were detained before individual grounds for suspicion of immigration violations could be formed, as the ACLU alleges, then law enforcement must have had to establish reasonable suspicion before ever setting foot on the property. According to the complaint, prior to the raid, undercover agents “determined that there were aliens unlawfully present” at previous La Catedral events, and so law enforcement “anticipated encountering aliens unlawfully present” during the raid. It is unclear how many illegal immigrants undercover agents established were at previous events. But the presence of an undocumented individual at a prior event does not, by itself, establish reasonable suspicion that the majority of attendees at a subsequent gathering would also be undocumented. Georgetown Law Professor Steve Vladeck told Lawfare that it “smacks of the very profiling that I think the courts are not going to be very excited about.”

Fourth and 14th Amendment protections exist, in theory, to prevent exactly this kind of alleged abuse.

In practice, holding federal officers liable for civil rights violations is exceptionally difficult. Section 1983, the standard vehicle for civil rights claims, applies only to state actors. Suing federal officers directly is theoretically possible under the Bivens doctrine, which allows individuals to seek damages for constitutional violations by federal officers. The Supreme Court, however, has severely limited its scope. The Federal Tort Claims Act provides a narrow path to sue the United States itself for constitutional violations by federal employees, but it does not allow plaintiffs to sue individual officers or agencies directly.

So, the Idaho plaintiffs got creative and have turned to a pair of Reconstruction-era statutes to build their case. Originally enacted to combat coordinated campaigns of racial violence, particularly by the Ku Klux Klan, 42 U.S.C. §§ 1985(3) and 1986 create a cause of action against conspiracies to deprive individuals of equal protection, and against those with knowledge of such conspiracies who fail to intervene.

Section 1985(3) allows individuals to sue when two or more people conspire to deprive them of equal protection under the law, a right enshrined by the 14th Amendment. To succeed, plaintiffs must prove four elements: first, that there was an agreement between at least two actors that amounts to a coordinated plan rather than just parallel conduct; second, that the purpose of the agreement was to deprive the rights of a person or group because of their protected class, such as race, gender, or national origin; third, that the conspirators took some concrete step to carry out that plan; and fourth, that the plaintiff suffered an injury or loss of a legal right as a result.

Section 1986, in turn, creates liability for anyone who knows of a §1985 conspiracy, has the power to prevent it or aid in preventing it, and fails to do so. 

These statutes are uncommon tools in modern litigation over immigration enforcement. A typical § 1983 or Bivens claim requires only that an individual officer has violated a plaintiff’s constitutional rights. A § 1985(3) claim, by contrast, requires proof of a coordinated plan involving at least two actors, carried out with “invidiously discriminatory animus” against a protected class. In other words, an agent illegally detaining an individual would theoretically be grounds to sue under § 1983 or Bivens. By contrast, under § 1985(3), multiple agents must have conspired to carry out an illegal detention specifically because of the person’s race, gender, or other protected characteristic.

Even where multiple actors jointly bring about a discriminatory act against a protected class, they may still fall short of § 1985(3)’s coordination requirement. Courts remain divided over the intra-corporate doctrine—whether two individuals within the same agency, or even the same jurisdiction, can be treated as separate actors. The Supreme Court has left the question open but noted in 2017 that there are “sound reasons” to conclude that conversations and agreements among officials in the same department should not support a § 1985(3) cause of action.

The Idaho case largely sidesteps the intra-corporate piece altogether. The operation was, by any measure, a massive, multiagency effort involving 200 officers from federal, state, and local agencies. Each agency played an active role on the ground, and agents in charge described the effort as impossible to carry out without everyone’s participation, according to emails referenced in the plaintiff’s complaint. Of course, proving multiagency coordination is one thing; the plaintiffs will still need to show that the various agencies planned to carry out this raid for the purpose of violating Latinos’ rights.

The ACLU will also need to prove that officers knew their actions would deprive a protected class—in this case, Latinos—of equal protection and yet failed to intervene. The ACLU argues that the rationale behind initial mass detention and the alleged harsher treatment of assumed Latinos meets this burden under § 1985(3). 

Class certification, which requires showing that a clearly identifiable group was subjected to discriminatory treatment, is plausible in the context of immigration enforcement operations. There has been only one other § 1985(3) case brought in response to an immigration roundup, Zelaya v. Hammer. The case arose from a 2018 cross-agency sweep at a Tennessee factory in which authorities used a valid search warrant as a pretext to detain Latino workers. A district court allowed the conspiracy-based claims to proceed, eventually granting it class status, before the case settled in 2023 for $1,570,000.

Michelle Lapointe, who served as an attorney for the plaintiffs in Zelaya v. Hammer, told Lawfare that the contention that undocumented individuals would be present at La Catedral on that Sunday, because some were observed at a previous event, “is even less compelling than it theoretically could be in a worksite context,” where the same employees appear day after day.

There is no telling how this case will play out. In many ways, it is wholly unique: Few immigration raids have this degree of scale, coordination, and alleged class discrimination. Nonetheless, the case just might be one of the most innovative and forceful legal challenges to federal immigration enforcement under the second Trump administration.

If the government prevails, it may usher in a new phase of immigration enforcement. As the Trump administration moves away from the aggressive, indiscriminate street sweeps that have now become a political liability, it might instead turn to the strategy allegedly used in Wilder, Idaho—relying on narrow criminal warrants as a pretext for mass sweeps where immigrants could be present. Such a practice would convert the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement into a tool for authorizing the very kinds of generalized searches and seizures it was designed to prevent.