Judge Thurston Enjoins Border Patrol Warrantless Sweeps After Bovino's El Centro Agents Racially Profile Farm Workers in Kern County

On April 29, 2025, U.S. District Judge Jennifer Thurston of the Eastern District of California issued an 88-page preliminary injunction barring Border Patrol agents in her district from stopping or arresting people without individualized reasonable suspicion, after finding that Greg Bovino’s El Centro Sector agents had conducted racially profiling sweeps of farm workers and day laborers in Kern County in January 2025.

The underlying operation, “Operation Return to Sender,” deployed approximately 60 El Centro Sector agents — traveling over 300 miles north from their home sector — to Kern County beginning January 7, 2025. Agents detained day laborers at a Home Depot parking lot, a convenience store, and along a highway running through agricultural fields, arresting 78 people in three days. The ACLU, United Farm Workers, and other organizations sued, alleging agents targeted individuals based on brown skin and apparent farmworker or day-laborer appearance. Judge Thurston found that evidence supported this claim, writing that agents had “detained people without reasonable suspicion” based on broad demographic assumptions rather than specific, articulable facts. The injunction explicitly prohibited warrantless arrests in the absence of documented probable cause that a person is a flight risk.

The ruling was an early judicial check on Bovino’s pattern of aggressive, race-based enforcement before he was elevated to commander-at-large in October 2025. By April 2026, Judge Thurston found that Border Patrol agents had continued conducting sweeps in violation of her injunction — arresting 11 noncitizens and one U.S. citizen in a Sacramento Home Depot parking lot using the same discredited “day laborer” profiling logic — and she granted United Farm Workers’ motion to enforce the injunction a second time.

Structurally, the Thurston case is the first of the four-judges pattern in which federal courts directly confronted and circumscribed Bovino’s operations. The El Centro-to-Kern deployment established the geographic mobility of his unit’s tactics and the judiciary’s documented awareness that those tactics violated constitutional limits — awareness the Trump administration systematically ignored as Bovino was promoted.