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Labor and Employment Law News, Pittsburgh, PA (2026)

10/07/2026

ACLU Files Bias Complaint Over Criteria’s Emotify Employer Tech
Oct. 6, 2026, 5:11 PM EDT, Khorri Atkinson, Senior Labor & Employment Reporter [REPRINTED FROM BLOOMBERG LAW]

The ACLU has asked the California Civil Rights Department to investigate a Criteria Corp. pre-employment assessment tool that purports to test candidates’ emotional intelligence over concerns about potential discrimination against applicants based on their disability, race, and s*x.

The tech company’s Emotify product warrants an immediate review because it closely mirrors clinical assessments for autism and related neurodevelopmental conditions, which state anti-bias law prohibits before making an employment offer, the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation and the ACLU Foundation of Northern California said in a complaint Tuesday.

The civil rights filing comes as providers of workplace hiring and management technology face increased legal and regulatory scrutiny due to their products’ potential to affect certain protected classes of workers and to trigger privacy issues.

Emotify is widely used by employers internationally in financial services, healthcare and several other industries, the complaint said, citing Criteria’s case studies. The software displays images of faces and descriptions of emotions, then asks candidates to identify whether they match, it said.

The complaint alleged that even if that doesn’t constitute a prohibited inquiry or medical examination, Emotify tends to screen out and disparately impact people with autism or other related conditions for non-job-related reasons.

The tool also doesn’t give applicants enough information to consider their options regarding an accommodation, it said.

“Emotify’s insufficient mechanism for facilitating accommodation requests or implementing alternative assessment methods makes it likely that neither Criteria nor employers who use its products are meeting reasonable accommodation obligations under state law,” the complaint said.

A company spokesperson didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
[Photo: Shutterstock].

10/01/2026

Insight
Employers With Blanket Return-to-Office Policies Risk Litigation, Oct. 1, 2026, 4:30 AM EDT, Kami Barker, Goddard Law [Reprinted from Bloomberg Law]

A federal appeals court has handed disabled employees the clearest weapon they’ve had in years. On Aug. 18, the US Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit ruled that an employer can’t simply declare in-person work “essential” — it must prove it, in front of a jury, with real evidence. The holding exposes the flimsy justification behind nearly every blanket return-to-office mandate issued since the Covid-19 pandemic ended, and it should terrify any employer still relying on one.

The case is Gardner v. Kutztown University. A professor with an autoimmune disorder taught remotely for over a decade before the university abruptly reinstated an in-person mandate and denied her requests to keep doing what she had already proven she could do well. The university argued that in-person teaching was simply an “essential function” of her job.

The Third Circuit disagreed, holding that whether in-person presence was truly essential is a question for a jury, not something an employer can declare by fiat after years of evidence to the contrary. Blanket policies that treat every teleworker’s job as identical can’t substitute for the individualized, fact-specific inquiry the Americans with Disabilities Act demands, the court held.

What distinguishes Gardner isn’t that the ADA requires individualized assessments — it always has. The decision refuses to let employers skip that step on a dismissal motion. Courts have long released employers from these cases early by declaring that a job requires a physical presence. Gardner closes that door and rejects blanket return-to-office mandates as a replacement for individualized review.

Employers can no longer count on avoiding trial when denying telework accommodations on the basis that the job requires an in-person presence. Instead, a jury makes that decision after all the discovery, depositions, and costs that come with it. Granting the accommodation up front is now the cheaper move.

I represent workers with disabilities for a living, and I’ve watched employers make the university’s mistake in Gardner countless times. I know this because it’s my life. I have spinal muscular atrophy, a progressive neuromuscular condition that stole my ability to walk when I was 11 years old. I’m also an employment discrimination litigator. For years, it felt as though those two facts couldn’t coexist in an industry that expected me in the office five days a week, which it determined was an essential function of the job.

From the inaccessible subways and sidewalks in New York City to a scarcity of accessible bathrooms in any workplace, restaurant, or public place, my body suffered from the exhausting task of simply getting to work five days a week. Then the pandemic sent every attorney in the country home, and employers could no longer claim my daily presence in the office was necessary.

Working from home didn’t make me less productive; it did the opposite. I stopped spending my days on things that had nothing to do with the law — commuting, finding accessible parking, navigating an inaccessible workplace — and started spending that energy on my clients and cases instead. It let me work more hours, not fewer, and have the endurance for days- and weeks-long mediations, arbitrations, and trials. It let me stay in this profession, earn a living, and maintain my health.

That was always the deal Congress offered, too. When it passed the ADA, Congress found that discrimination against people with disabilities “costs the United States billions of dollars in unnecessary expenses resulting from dependency and nonproductivity,” and that the law exists to secure “equality of opportunity, full participation, independent living, and economic self-sufficiency.”

For 30 years, ramps, elevators, and lawsuits moved that needle unevenly and slowly, while disability employment regressed — until remote work became commonplace and did in two years what three decades of litigation couldn’t. Employment among people with disabilities hit its highest level since 2008, with labor force participation climbing three times faster for workers with disabilities than for everyone else.

My advice to employers is simple: Take Gardner seriously, and get more generous with telework accommodations now, before a jury makes you. For nearly two years, US employers sent employees home and still got the job done, which makes it awfully hard to now claim that letting one disabled employee keep doing the same job from the same home office is an “undue hardship.”

Even the federal government learned this the hard way: After agencies stripped telework from employees with disabilities under blanket return-to-office orders with no individual assessment, the Eastern District of Virginia in Panian v. Blanche ordered the Justice Department to reinstate telework for two of its own disabled attorneys. Employers who keep gambling on blanket mandates instead of individualized assessments aren’t avoiding litigation risk — they’re financing it, one denied accommodation at a time.

Gardner, Panian, and the growing chorus of decisions behind them confirm that telework accommodations aren’t per se unreasonable, while blanket return-to-office orders are. Employers can accept that now, at the negotiating table, or they can accept it later, in front of a jury, after years of discovery and a verdict with their name on it. The choice — and the bill — is theirs.

The case is Gardner v. Kutztown University, 3d Cir., No. 25-1295, unpublished 8/18/26.

This article does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Bloomberg Industry Group Inc., the publisher of Bloomberg Law, Bloomberg Tax, and Bloomberg Government, or its owners.

10/01/2026

Deep Dive
Trump Labor Board’s Court Loss Challenges GOP Members’ Mettle
Oct. 1, 2026, 5:05 AM EDT, Robert Iafolla, Principal Legal Reporter [Reprinted from Bloomberg Law]

The National Labor Relations Board must weigh whether to ask for en banc review of a recent Seventh Circuit ruling that raises the bar it getting 10(j) injunctions.

An appeals court decision making it harder for the National Labor Relations Board to wield one of its strongest weapons will test the agency’s willingness to defend its power.

Unless the NLRB asks the full US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit to review a recent panel ruling, it will be stuck with a much higher bar when it goes to court seeking injunctions in labor law cases within the circuit’s jurisdiction.

Those types of orders are crucial to stop harms to workers’ rights that the board wouldn’t be able to fix when it eventually rules in the underlying administrative case, but courts are divided on how difficult it should be for the agency to obtain them.

The NLRB has stepped up several times after difficult appeals court defeats during the second Trump administration, contesting at least four decisions that had implications for its authority.

“Even the Republican members are looking out for the board’s interests as an agency,” said Jeffrey Hirsch, a labor law professor at the University of North Carolina and a former NLRB appellate attorney. “That’s a victory for the agency.”

Full circuit court consideration, known as en banc review, is even more important for the NLRB because of its aversion to petitioning the US Supreme Court. It’s been a decade since it asked the justices to overturn an appellate court decision.

While the Supreme Court has grown increasingly hostile toward the administrative state in recent years — typified by its 2024 decision in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo killing the agency-friendly Chevron doctrine — the NLRB’s troubles there go back even longer. It’s been 30 years since the board obtained an outright victory there, according to a Bloomberg Law review of cases.

The board’s appellate strategy is also influenced by its policy of nonacquiescence, under which it continues to apply its interpretation of the National Labor Relations Act even if a circuit court says it’s wrong.

That policy allows the board to tolerate adverse rulings more than other federal agencies, said Toby Latham, a former NLRB attorney who now practices at Vasseghi Law Group.

“There’s no incentive or benefit to rush to the Supreme Court when it’s still playing out in the circuit courts and the board can operate,” Latham said. “Especially if there’s no certainty about how it would play out with the current composition of the Supreme Court.”

Pragmatic Choice
The NLRB’s process for seeking en banc review begins with a memo prepared by the general counsel’s office when the board loses in circuit court, former agency officials said. Those memos include a recommendation on whether to challenge the ruling before the full circuit court or the Supreme Court, options that are subject to a board vote.

The choice can be relatively pragmatic, as the board must consider the likelihood of success before a particular full circuit court and the cost of continuing appellate litigation, said Marvin Kaplan, who served as NLRB chair for the first seven months of the second Trump administration.

“With limited resources, the board has to decide if it makes sense to fight,” said Kaplan, now an attorney at Jackson Lewis PC. “From the board’s perspective, none of this is free.”

The Fifth Circuit handed down a tough loss for the NLRB about a week before Kaplan’s term ended, temporarily halting unfair labor practice cases against a trio of companies based on their constitutional claims targeting the agency. The decision all but guaranteed that other employers could get provisional freezes of ULP proceedings by filing similar constitutional lawsuits within that circuit.

The NLRB didn’t contest the panel’s decision at the full Fifth Circuit, which is widely viewed as the most conservative, anti-agency federal appeals court.

“It’s reasonable to say there was a question about whether that would be a good use of resources,” Kaplan said.

Seeking Review
The NLRB has one pending en banc petition, a request for the full District of Columbia Circuit to reverse a divided panel decision that nixed its temporary restriction on successor employers withdrawing recognition from incumbent unions. The agency framed the case as a test of court deference to its power to set national labor policy under Loper Bright.

The board has had one success during the second Trump administration getting an adverse panel ruling flipped. In August, the full Ninth Circuit modified its own precedent in a way that restored the NLRB’s ability to resolve clashes between unions vying for the same work.

The agency has had a tougher time at the Sixth Circuit, where it was twice stymied when requesting review of panel decisions delivering major blows to its authority.

The Cincinnati-based appeals court snubbed the board’s petition asking it to reverse a split ruling that threatens its foundational power to create labor policy through individual case decisions.

That court also turned aside the NLRB’s bid for reconsideration of a divided decision that raised the bar for the agency to win 10(j) injunctions, a powerful tool named after a section of the National Labor Relations Act that lets the board go directly to court while it continues to process cases administratively. That ruling applies in Ohio, Michigan, Tennessee, and Kentucky.

The NLRB is now faced with deciding whether to challenge a similar split ruling that the Seventh Circuit handed down earlier this month, imposing a tougher injunction standard in Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin.

Fighting to protect workers’ rights is especially important for the NLRB in the current political moment, said Jennifer Abruzzo, who served as the agency’s general counsel during the Biden administration.

“That includes exhausting all forms of review in the district and circuit courts in order to fiercely defend its congressional mandate and authority,” said Abruzzo, now a senior adviser with the Communications Workers of America and of counsel with Bush Gottlieb.

10/01/2026

Harvard Sued by EEOC for DEI Data in Anti-White Bias Probe (1)
Sept. 30, 2026, 9:22 AM EDT; Updated: Sept. 30, 2026, 12:26 PM EDT, Tobi Raji, Reporter [Reprinted from Bloomberg Law]

The EEOC asked a Massachusetts federal judge to compel Harvard University to produce documents related to its diversity and inclusion programs as part of an agency investigation into alleged bias against certain workers on campus.
The lawsuit stems from a charge filed by EEOC Chair Andrea Lucas that claims systemic discrimination on the basis of race and s*x, and alleges that Harvard's recruitment, development, and promotion efforts intentionally discriminated against certain employees and applicants.
The subpoena seeks documents related to Harvard's diversity and inclusion programs, including the establishment of its Office for Faculty Development and Diversity, hiring committee guidance, and information on faculty position applicants.
The EEOC asked a Massachusetts federal judge to compel Harvard University to produce documents related to its diversity and inclusion programs as part of an agency investigation into alleged bias against White, Asian, male, and heteros*xual workers on campus.

The lawsuit stems from a charge filed by Trump-appointed Equal Employment Opportunity Commission Chair Andrea Lucas that claims systemic discrimination on the basis of race and s*x. The EEOC said Harvard failed to fully comply with the subpoena request, prompting Tuesday’s enforcement action in the US District Court for the District of Massachusetts.

Since the start of President Donald Trump’s second term, Lucas has made good on her promise to scrutinize diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts that she views as being discriminatory toward White men. She has issued guidance warning how DEI programs could be discriminatory, sent letters to 20 top law firms announcing her intent to investigate their DEI practices, and filed subpoena enforcement actions against large companies as part of investigations into their programs.

Lucas’ enforcement priorities have been buttressed by the US Supreme Court’s 2023 decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard curtailing race-based affirmative action admissions policies at Harvard and a separate 2025 ruling overturning the standard that nonminority plaintiffs provide extra proof to show discrimination.

Harvard didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on the new subpoena enforcement action.

Lucas’ commissioner’s charge, which is included in the lawsuit, claims Harvard’s recruitment, development, and promotion efforts in pursuit of a diverse faculty intentionally discriminated against White, Asian, male, or straight employees and applicants in violation of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

The class of individuals affected by Harvard’s employment practices extends to student workers and training program participants, the charge said. The EEOC pointed to the university’s admissions policies for 13 training programs, including Harvard Medical School’s Summer Training in Academic Research and Scholarship Program for college and first year medical school students who are typically underrepresented in medicine.

The subpoena seeks documents related to the establishment of the university’s Office for Faculty Development and Diversity and its Presidential Task Force on Inclusion and Belonging, as well as all related agendas and meeting minutes from Jan. 1, 2018, through the “present.” It seeks the job descriptions, performance plans, and performance reviews for three diversity and inclusion staff members.

The EEOC has also asked Harvard to turn over documents related to hiring committee guidance and interview notes. The commission requested the names, cover letters, curricula vitae, and resumes of all applicants for any faculty position during the time period, along with information on their s*x, race, position applied for, the school’s decision on the application, that date, and name and title of decision-maker.

Harvard asked the EEOC to revoke the subpoena, calling the charge it’s based on overly broad and unduly burdensome.

The university said the subpoena amounts to an “impermissible fishing expedition” and accused Lucas of participating in “the whole-of-Government retaliation” against Harvard that began in 2025.

“The Subpoena is timed with yet another ratcheting up of pressure against Harvard in an attempt to get it to cave to the Administration’s ideological demands,” the university’s lawyers at King & Spalding LLP wrote in the petition.

The US Justice Department sued Harvard in May seeking detailed records on hundreds of thousands of applicants to ensure that the university is complying with the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision. Harvard similarly called that request too broad.

Lucas has overseen several discrimination probes of higher education institutions across the country. The commission investigated the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University, and Barnard College for antisemitism.

Last year, the EEOC reached a record-breaking $221 million settlement agreement with Columbia, with $21 million earmarked for the agency itself.

The case is EEOC v. Harvard, D. Mass., No. 1:26-mc-91522, subpoena enforcement action filed 9/29/26.

09/23/2026

Deep Dive
Vocational Rehab Patients Pushing Back Against Work Without Pay, Sept. 23, 2026, 5:15 AM EDT, Maia Pandey, Reporter [REPRINT FROM BLOOMBERG LAW]

Substance abuse treatment centers that require patients to work unpaid as part of the program are coming under scrutiny after recent wage-and-hour litigation and state enforcement actions.

This month, Massachusetts attorney general hit the Adults & Teen Challenge Northeast Inc. recovery program with $1.15 million in citations for allegedly requiring participants to perform unpaid labor as a condition of treatment. That finding came just weeks after a Texas federal judge allowed a former patient’s suit against a Houston drug rehabilitation program over similar unpaid wage claims to advance to trial.

Such cases pose the relatively novel legal question of when, if at all, rehabilitation patients count as employees under the federal Fair Labor Standards Acts or state law if they’re completing labor while enrolled in a recovery program. Despite one recent federal appeals court decision establishing a test for these situations, there’s no clear consensus among courts.

Patients have filed claims against both the organizations providing treatment — which kept the wages they earned — and the businesses for which they worked.

Thirteenth Amendment and Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act claims also could come into play in situations where participants are offered entry into a work-treatment program in lieu of jail time, said Caroline J. Berdzik, co-chair of Goldberg Segalla’s employment and labor practice group.

“This impacts areas of the law that don’t frequently come across the desk of employment attorneys,” Berdzik said. “Wage-and-hour obviously, but then you have this subset of trafficking laws and potential convict labor, which makes for pretty high-stakes analysis.”

‘Not a New Concept’
The work-treatment rehab model is “not a new concept,” though such vocational programs have become more common in recent years as the opioid crisis has driven demand for drug recovery care, according to Robyn Oster, policy director for the Partnership to End Addiction.

The programs often involve participants who have been court-ordered to take part in rehabilitation in lieu of incarceration — with some told they may face incarceration if they don’t fulfill work requirements.

Data on the prevalence of these programs is relatively scant, Oster said. An estimated 14% to 33% of state-licensed treatment facilities nationwide require residents to work, though not all residents are unpaid, according to a 2024 US Government Accountability Office report.

In some cases, vocational requirements can provide “purpose, structure, and routine” that’s helpful for recovery, or in the case of paid work, help set up patients to reenter the workforce, Oster said.

But unpaid work for third-party businesses can be a slippery slope to exploitation, especially under threat of incarceration, she said.

The Massachusetts attorney general found participants in the penalized treatment program were entitled to more than $850,000 in earned wages for cleaning offices, landscaping, shoveling snow, and preparing food for external for-profit companies.

“Work just in and of itself isn’t treatment,” Oster added.

Court Rulings
Patients whose FLSA and state claims reached federal circuits have faced mixed results so far.

In 2020, patients won more than $1.3 million in damages against the Arkansas-based Drug and Alcohol Recovery Program — DARP Inc. — and the businesses where they worked. But the US Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit found two years later the patients weren’t employees because they “undertook the recovery program for their own purposes to avoid imprisonment, and they had no reason to expect compensation.”

The Second Circuit reached a similar conclusion in 2019 in ruling on a patient’s claim against a New York treatment facility.

However, in 2023, the Tenth Circuit remanded claims against CAAIR — Christian Alcoholics & Addicts in Recovery — to the Northern District of Oklahoma after finding a judge improperly dismissed the case over jurisdiction concerns.

Perhaps most notably, the Fifth Circuit’s 2024 Klick v. Cenikor decision found whether the patients or the employer — in this case, the Cenikor Foundation’s rehab program — benefited more from an arrangement determines whether the patient legally counts as an employee.

Two patients separated themselves from that collective action to bring their claims individually. The Fifth Circuit’s “primary beneficiary” test formed the bedrock for one patient’s August win to secure a jury trial.

Shelby Lee Williams’ claims survived Cenikor’s partial summary judgment motion, with the judge finding it benefited more from the work arrangement and therefore qualified as his employer. Williams alleged he regularly worked over 60 hours weekly and had to sometimes skip addiction counseling sessions for work.

Still, the primary beneficiary test may be trickier to survive at trial, according to Curt Hesse, an attorney for Moore & Associates representing Williams.

Rehabilitation centers often argue that “sobriety is priceless, and that’s always going to be more important than any sort of money,” he said.

“That’s what they’re going to try to sell to a jury,” Hesse said. “We’re going to push back and say, ‘Look, you’re really just taking advantage of these people when they’re at their worst.’”

Labor Value
Patients have often pointed to the monetary value of their labor to establish who benefited most. Cenikor, which said it reinvests money from patient work into treatment services, made over $7 million in 2017 from their labor, the August opinion said.

Cenikor sent patients to work in warehouses, refineries, and chemical plants for Exxon Mobil, Shell, and Walmart, according to Justin Chopin, owner of the Chopin Law Firm who represented Cenikor patients at the Fifth Circuit. None of those companies were defendants in the case.

“This was really hard labor,” Chopin said. “In some of these jobs, you would anticipate that person being paid a lot of money.”

Berdzik said she would advise employers working with treatment facilities to automatically treat patients as employees to avoid liability.

“The safest defensible model is one where the work is genuinely and demonstrably therapeutic, individualized, and not sold to third parties,” she said.

“If the task is dictated by what this outside entity needs, rather than what the participant needs for their recovery, there’s going to be a wage-hour issue,” Berdzik said.

[Photo credit: Shutterstock]

09/23/2026

Maryland Governor Calls for AI Job Bias Guidance, Safety Rules
Sept. 22, 2026, 10:21 AM EDT, Chris Marr, Senior Correspondent [REPRINT BLOOMBERG LAW]

Maryland labor and civil rights agencies are set to issue guidance detailing how the state’s anti-discrimination laws apply to employment decisions made using AI technology, Gov. Wes Moore (D) said.

The bias guidance is part of a multi-prong policy framework that Moore announced Tuesday, with the broad aims of protecting consumers, workers, and children from the potential harms of artificial intelligence.

State regulatory efforts on AI’s use in employment decisions have slowly gained momentum, even as the tech industry has opposed most proposals and the Trump administration has sought to preempt or limit states’ authority to govern AI.

Moore’s framework calls for guidance on bias laws’ application to employment as well as finance, housing, and other existing civil rights and consumer protections.

The governor plans to seek legislation as well to regulate the “most concerning potential aspects of AI for workers — e.g. social scoring, tracking to undermine worker organizing, systemic bias,” according to Tuesday’s announcement. He also plans to convene a task force representing businesses, labor unions, and academics to recommend policies on worker retraining and adaptation to changes in the economy and job market driven by AI.

If the legislature supports Moore’s proposals, Maryland would join a small but growing number of states passing laws or regulations to specifically govern private-sector employers’ use of AI in personnel decisions and workplace management, including California, Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, and New Jersey.

Moore’s plan also calls for regulating frontier AI developers, including mandatory safety testing and audits, 72-hour incident reporting, and whistleblower protections.

[Photo credit: Shutterstock]

09/22/2026

Case: Discrimination/Retaliation (2d Cir.)
Sept. 22, 2026, 10:20 AM EDT

Newton v. LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton Inc., 2026 BL 368335, 2d Cir., 25-1697-cv, 9/21/26

The Second Circuit vacated a New York federal district court’s dismissal of a Title VII of the Civil Rights Act retaliation claim by a female Black and Afro-Latina vice president of legal affairs at LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, holding that her refusal to meet with her supervisor to discuss settling her pending discrimination claims constituted protected activity and that temporal proximity combined with intervening antagonism plausibly alleged causation for her termination.

This story was produced by Bloomberg Law Automation and edited by Bloomberg Law staff.

09/22/2026

Court Blocks ICE Immigration Raids at Alabama Construction Sites
Sept. 21, 2026, 2:11 PM EDT, Khorri Atkinson, Senior Labor & Employment Reporter [REPRINT FROM BLOOMBERG LAW NEWS]

An Alabama federal judge blocked the Trump administration from making warrantless arrests and detaining construction workers in the state without reasonable suspicion that they’re undocumented.

Immigration officers will be temporarily barred from conducting raids on private construction sites without a warrant or consent while a proposed class action filed by an American-born construction worker proceeds, after Chief Judge Jeffrey Beaverstock of the US District Court Southern District of Alabama on Monday granted a preliminary injunction.

Leonardo Garcia Venegas claimed in the lawsuit he was detained twice last year during separate warrantless raids while doing his job in Baldwin County. Officers refused to believe him when he told them he’s a US citizen, and failed to recognize his ID as proof of legal status, he said.

Without an injunction, Venegas told the court he faces an imminent risk that his liberty and privacy rights will continue to be violated.

The suit is one of several accusing the Trump administration of illegally detaining people because they appear to be Latino and may lack legal status to be in the country. While critics maintain the practice constitutes racial profiling, the White House has defended the lawfulness of those hard-line immigration policies.

In Monday’s order, Beaverstock said an injunction is warranted because Venegas demonstrated he’d likely prevail on the merits of his arguments stating that Department of Homeland Security regulations and the Constitution forbid immigration officers from searching non-public areas of construction sites without a warrant and making arrests based on workers’ ethnicity.

“The court is not persuaded by the government’s position that it never needs a warrant to enter a construction site. When taken at face value, this position undermines the fact specific considerations required by Fourth Amendment precedent,” which established the right against unreasonable search and seizure, the judge said.

Beaverstock also dismissed the government’s claim that Venegas attempted to interfere with an arrest this year while immigration officers were allegedly conducting investigative stop at his worksite, that he posed a safety threat, and that they reasonably believed he was undocumented.

There’s no evidence to support this argument, as “videos of the encounter show that another individual was being detained, and a federal agent was next to Venegas,” the order said. “To conclude that the agent approached Venegas only after the detention of the other male being detained is speculation. Moreover, the video does not show Venegas attempting to verbally or physically interfere with the other detention in any manner.”

Attorney Jared McClain withthe Institute for Justice, a libertarian public interest group representing Venegas, called Beaverstock’s order “a huge blow to DHS’s lawless enforcement practices.”

“By setting aside those unconstitutional policies, the court has restored the rule of law,” he said in a statement. “Construction workers like Leo can finally go to work in peace again.”

DHS didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Venegas v. Homan , S.D. Ala., No. 1:25-cv-00397, order issued 9/21/26 .
[Photo credit: Shutterstock]

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