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Supreme Court blesses racial profiling because of course [1]
['Daily Kos Staff']
Date: 2025-09-08
The now familiar 6-3 lineup at the United States Supreme Court just threw out decades of settled law so that President Donald Trump’s roving bands of masked federal agents in Los Angeles can engage in a little light racial profiling, as a treat, and can continue scooping up people based on nothing more than looking Latino, speaking Spanish, and working at a low-wage job like a car wash.
You know the drill. A lower-court judge wrote a detailed, thoughtful, lengthy opinion about how this practice was 100% racial profiling and ordered the government to stop doing it. The Trump administration ran to the Supreme Court to say that the world would crumble if they couldn’t racially profile brown people in Los Angeles right away, and the Supreme Court obliged by staying the lower court’s order. That stay prevents the lower court’s order from going into effect, so federal agents can continue this straight-up racist, unconstitutional behavior.
Immigration agents conduct an operation at a car wash on Aug. 15 in Montebello, California.
These detentions and arrests aren’t based on the agent having a particular reason to believe the specific person they are detaining is an undocumented immigrant. Instead, they are arguing they can detain anyone who fits their conception of an undocumented immigrant—basically, lower-income brown people who work difficult, menial jobs.
That’s the opposite of what the federal regulations say they are allowed to do. Immigration officers can only detain someone for questioning if they have “a reasonable suspicion, based on specific articulable facts, that the person being questioned is, or is attempting to be, engaged in an offense against the United States or is an alien illegally in the United States[.]”
Does arresting or detaining people for no reason at all violate the Fourth Amendment’s requirement that probable cause is required to search or seize someone? It sure does! If a police officer wants to stop someone on the street and search them, they have to have a level of reasonable suspicion about that particular person, such as believing they are armed and about to commit a crime. Law enforcement officers have to be able to justify stopping specific people based on specific concerns rather than being able to stop whole groups of people based on shared characteristics.
The Supreme Court even addressed this in the immigration context some 50 years ago in U.S. v. Brignoni-Ponce. There, the government asserted that Border Patrol agents could stop any car near the border if the driver appeared Mexican, because undocumented immigrants travel in vehicles driven by Mexican individuals. The Supreme Court rejected this, saying that it would scoop up legitimate traffic as well and didn’t show any particularized suspicion that a particular vehicle was carrying undocumented immigrants.
Related | These Supreme Court justices want you to just shut up already
But that’s essentially what federal agents in Los Angeles are doing, and the conservatives love it, apparently. Not that you’d know, because the stay was unsigned and has no explanation as to why the conservative majority thinks it is no big deal to arrest people because they have the wrong skin color. It’s just another shadow docket ruling that allows Trump to do whatever he wants.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor pulled no punches, even refusing to engage in the faux-civility of the tradition of saying “I respectfully dissent.” Nope, here it is just “I dissent.” While that may seem like a nerdy, legalistic, tiny thing to focus on, in the context of how the justices communicate with one another through their opinions, it’s Sotomayor saying the actions and reasoning—or lack thereof—of her colleagues are not worthy of respect.
And they’re not. The conservatives are letting Trump’s masked brownshirts occupy a major American city and send roving masked men with guns to jump out of vehicles and tackle day laborers at Home Depot. They are letting those roving patrols violently surround and attack a tamale vendor for being a tamale vendor, never asking any questions about his immigration status. They are letting ICE show up at car washes and arresting only Hispanic-appearing people, while not even questioning white immigrants.
In a time when Supreme Court decisions have been almost universally bleak, this is one of the bleakest. Federal agents in Los Angeles are engaged in racial profiling and racialized violence. ICE agents are terrorizing the city, and people are afraid to go outside, go to work, or go anywhere that they might be arrested and detained for no reason save for the color of their skin. It’s one of the most un-American things imaginable and the kind of thing the Supreme Court is supposed to step in and stop.
Instead, the court’s six conservatives declared that Trump’s desire to engage in the most xenophobic violent racism imaginable, to wreak havoc on an American city because it doesn’t have a sufficient number of white people, is so important that he cannot be stopped, even for a moment, while litigation plays out. Without any explanation, the court’s six conservatives signaled just how much they support those efforts. It sure does not feel great to see the protections of the Fourth Amendment dismantled with nary a word.
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