Federal officials need a warrant to enter construction sites to conduct immigration raids, a federal judge in Alabama said in an order stemming from a civil suit.

The government is entering construction sites without a warrant, preemptively detaining individuals without proper cause and improperly holding people even after they’ve proven their immigration status, U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Beaverstock found in a Sept. 21 order that temporarily bars the policies. 

Beaverstock, who was appointed by President Donald Trump, found that the federal government likely violated the Fourth Amendment rights of Leo Garcia Venegas, who was detained twice on construction sites while at work in Alabama.

Venegas sued, alleging that the Department of Homeland Security had either explicit or de facto policies allowing for warrantless searches of construction sites and the detention of suspected individuals without legal immigration status without cause. 

The White House referred a request for comment to DHS, which did not immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday morning. 

In court, DHS denied that the policies exist, and a DHS official testified that Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers and other immigration officers “are trained to have developed reasonable suspicion that the individual has committed or is committing a federal crime or federal immigration violation” prior to engaging in investigative stops. 

Beaverstock wasn’t swayed by the denials, which were the subject of their own hearing, and found that the policies existed.

Venegas was first detained at a Lennar development site in May 2025, where he alleges that he was tackled to the ground despite telling an officer he was a U.S. citizen and that immigration enforcement officers didn’t promptly release him when he presented his valid U.S. REAL ID. 

He was detained a month later while at work on a D.R. Horton site 20 miles from the Lennar development and was released after presenting his identification.

Attorneys for the federal government argued that it didn’t need a warrant to enter a construction site and that Venegas did not have a reasonable expectation of privacy against a search at a worksite. The judge wrote that both arguments were unpersuasive, and instead issued the temporary stay. 

The order prevents the government from “permitting immigration officers to raid private construction sites without a warrant or consent,” holding employees without a specific suspicion about their immigration status and continuing to hold individuals even after they show proper documentation. 

Beaverstock wrote that the prohibitions shouldn’t present hurdles for the federal government, which denied it had related policies in place in the first place. 

“The Government has maintained that the policies for which Venegas seeks relief do not exist. It defies reason then, that enjoining those policies would ‘curtail’ anything,” he wrote.