Your Independent Journal from the Heartland
The US Supreme Court on Sept. 8 gave its approval for federal immigration agents to stop and detain anyone in the Los Angeles area based on factors including “the type of work one does,” a person’s use of Spanish or accented English, or their “apparent race or ethnicity”—allowing what critics called “blatant racial profiling” to be used to carry out President Donald Trump’s mass detention and deportation plan, Julia Conley noted at Common Dreams (9/8).
The court’s three liberal justices dissented, but the right-wing majority sided with the Department of Homeland Security, whose agents in recent months have carried out sweeping raids across the Los Angeles area, including in incidents that have been caught on video and appear to be armed roundups of large randomized groups of Latino people—not operations targeted at arresting violent criminals, as the Trump administration has previously suggested.
The court did not provide an explanation of its reasoning, but Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote a separate opinion expressing agreement with the ruling, saying the court was simply allowing immigration agents to use “commonsense” criteria for stopping and detaining people, including their English proficiency and the type of work they do.
In their dissenting opinion, Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote, “We should not have to live in a country where the government can seize anyone who looks Latino, speaks Spanish, and appears to work a low-wage job.”
“Rather than stand idly by while our constitutional freedoms are lost, I dissent,” wrote Sotomayor.
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council (AIC) said the ruling by the right-wing majority has troubling implications.
“Because a sizeable portion of Los Angeles’s low-income Latino community is undocumented,” he said, the court believes “it is inherently acceptable for [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] to stop and question any Latino working a low-wage job that is seen seeking Spanish.”
Civil rights groups joined several individuals in filing a lawsuit against the administration earlier this year, arguing that thousands of people in Los Angeles have been wrongly arrested in unconstitutional, “indiscriminate immigration operations.”
“Individuals with brown skin are approached or pulled aside by unidentified federal agents, suddenly and with a show of force,” the plaintiffs argued, “and made to answer questions about who they are and where they are from.”
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other federal agents have been violating the US Constitution’s Fourth Amendment, they said, which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures.
In July, Judge Maame E. Frimpong in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, ordered agents not to stop or arrest people in the Los Angeles area based on factors including race and ethnicity, language spoken, or their involvement in particular kinds of work including at day-laborer or farming sites.
The Trump administration later appealed to the Supreme Court, saying the lower court’s order had unlawfully interfered with ICE operations and claiming agents use discretion to ensure they don’t wrongfully include people in immigration sweeps.
