source: WOLA
Supreme Court upholds “roving patrols” and profiling
In a brief September 8 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court gave its approval, pending further consideration by lower courts, for aggressive immigration enforcement targeting individuals based solely on their apparent race, ethnicity, language, location, or employment. The decision lifts a July federal district court order to halt such enforcement in Los Angeles, which an appeals court had kept in place during its ongoing review.
As a result, the New York Times explained, “For American citizens of Hispanic descent in Los Angeles—especially people who speak with an accent or work as manual laborers—that means they will continue to risk being stopped and questioned whenever they go out. They may see it as a necessary precaution to always carry documents with them in a way that other Americans need not.”
The high court’s six Republican-nominated judges voted to undo the stay on roving patrols and sweeps by armed, masked agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Customs and Border Protection (CBP), and supporting agencies, with Justice Brett Kavanaugh writing a concurring opinion. The three Democratic-nominated judges voted to keep the stay in place and wrote a dissenting opinion.
An aggressive operation, halted
Between June 6, when the Trump administration launched a large-scale operation, and late August, ICE and affiliated agencies arrested 5,210 presumably undocumented people in the Los Angeles area, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) stated. Especially during its first month, the operation featured frequent “roundups of random Hispanic people by armed agents,” as the New York Times described it, many of them caught on mobile phone videos shared widely on social media. Agents paid repeated visits to the same sites, while U.S. citizens of Latino descent reported being stopped more than once within spans of just a few days.
Analyzing ICE data obtained by the Deportation Data Project, the Cato Institute’s David Bier found in early August that fully one-fifth of ICE arrests since January 20 were of Latino individuals taken off the streets with no prior criminal records and no removal orders. “This policy is a threat to the rights of all people in the United States,” Bier warned.
On June 20, several people caught up in these sweeps, along with Los Angeles-area legal defense groups, filed a potential class-action lawsuit in federal court. (The case is Vásquez Perdomo v. Noem.) On July 11, District Court Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong, a Biden appointee, granted the plaintiffs’ request for a temporary restraining order, noting a “mountain of evidence” that the sweeps were violating people’s constitutional rights.
This order halted all “detentive stops” by immigration personnel without “reasonable suspicion” of undocumented presence in the United States. It specified that reasonable suspicion cannot be based solely on four criteria indicative of racial profiling: “(1) apparent race or ethnicity; (2) speaking Spanish or speaking English with an accent; (3) presence at a particular location (e.g. bus stop, car wash, tow yard, day laborer pick up site, agricultural site, etc.); or (4) the type of work one does.”
On July 28, a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously kept the restraining order in place, denying the government’s request to stay it. The four listed factors, the two Clinton-appointed and one Biden-appointed judges found, “describe only a broad profile and ‘do not demonstrate reasonable suspicion for any particular stop,’” legal analyst Chris Geidner explained.
ICE arrests dropped by 66 percent in the Los Angeles area following the restraining order, according to mid-August analysis of Deportation Data Project statistics by Cato’s Bier.
The Supreme Court lifts the restraining order
The restraining order is now lifted. The entire Supreme Court majority did not explain the reasoning behind its September 8 decision, which it rarely does when ruling, on its “emergency” or “shadow” docket, whether to keep policies in place while lower courts decide on their legality.
In his solo concurring opinion, though, Justice Kavanaugh asserted that a person’s ethnicity can be used as a “relevant” factor in determining whether an agent might stop someone. Kavanaugh voiced the view that when U.S. citizens are stopped, “questioning in those circumstances is typically brief, and those individuals may promptly go free after making clear to the immigration officers that they are U.S. citizens or otherwise legally in the United States.” This does not describe the experience of plaintiffs in the Vásquez Perdomo case, and appears to imply that people at risk of racial profiling must never avoid going out in public without proof of citizenship.
“Countless people in the Los Angeles area have been grabbed, thrown to the ground, and handcuffed simply because of their looks, their accents, and the fact they make a living by doing manual labor,” read a dissenting opinion written by Justice Sonia Sotomayor and joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. “Today, the Court needlessly subjects countless more to these exact same indignities.”
The case (not the restraining order) continues to move through the courts, with an appellate court hearing set for September 24.
“Going hard”
In the meantime, sweeps and patrols are resuming. Gregory Bovino, the Border Patrol sector chief placed in charge of “at large” mass deportation operations in Los Angeles, tweeted, “quite frankly the poorly written ( very poorly) temp restrainig [sic.] order was the worst i’ve ever seen. We are going hard in Los Angeles today and are hitting a location as I write this.“ A DHS tweet promised to “continue to FLOOD THE ZONE in Los Angeles.”
Geidner, the legal analyst who authors the Law Dork newsletter, warned that the high court’s move “makes a mockery of the Fourth Amendment’s protections against unreasonable searches or seizures, with significant worrying consequences for all people in America—whether you lack documentation to be in this country or are a citizen of it.”
A statement from California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s (D) office went further: “Trump’s hand-picked Supreme Court majority just became the Grand Marshal for a parade of racial terror in Los Angeles. This isn’t about enforcing immigration laws—it’s about targeting Latinos and anyone who doesn’t look or sound like Stephen Miller’s idea of an American, including U.S. citizens and children, to deliberately harm California’s families and small businesses. Trump’s private police force now has a green light to come after your family.”
“When ICE grabbed me, they never showed a warrant or explained why,” read a statement from the named plaintiff in the case, Pedro Vásquez Perdomo, a U.S. citizen. “I was treated like I didn’t matter–locked up, cold, hungry, and without a lawyer. Now, the Supreme Court says that’s okay? That’s not justice. That’s racism with a badge.”
