The Supreme Court has lifted restrictions that barred the Trump administration from carrying out immigration-related raids in the Los Angeles area based on broad criteria such as speaking Spanish or gathering at locations day laborers often congregate.
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The justices, who apparently divided 6-3 along ideological lines, put on hold a federal district judge’s order that reined in what critics called “roving” raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. That judge had found the tactics were likely unconstitutional because agents were detaining people without probable cause at car washes, bus stops and Home Depot parking lots based on stereotypes.
The high court’s majority offered no explanation for its decision to grant the Trump administration’s emergency appeal to block the district judge’s order. However, Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote separately in support of the decision, saying it was reasonable to briefly question people who meet multiple “common sense” criteria for possible illegal presence — including employment in day labor or construction, and limited English proficiency.
The court’s three liberal justices dissented.
“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,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. “Rather than stand idly by while our constitutional freedoms are lost, I dissent.”
The Justice Department complained in an emergency appeal last month that the court-ordered limitations amounted to “a straitjacket” for law enforcement officers carrying out President Donald Trump’s mass-deportation policy.
However, immigrant rights and civil liberties advocates accused federal officers of stopping Latinos solely because they were speaking Spanish or present at home improvement store parking lots or car washes. With nearly half the population in L.A. of Hispanic origin, such a broad-brush approach is certain to sweep up many U.S. citizens and legal immigrants, the advocates said.
Sotomayor said in her dissent that Supreme Court precedent makes clear that immigration officers cannot rely on ethnicity alone to make stops seeking potentially undocumented immigrants and “ethnicity and language are often intertwined, so relying on only those two factors is no different than relying on ethnicity alone.” She said adding certain types of businesses to the mix was “plainly insufficient” to make the stops legal.
Sotomayor said the high court’s ruling posed a threat not just to undocumented foreigners but to Americans of Hispanic descent.
“The Government, and now the concurrence, has all but declared that all Latinos, U. S. citizens or not, who work low wage jobs are fair game to be seized at any time, taken away from work, and held until they provide proof of their legal status to the agents’ satisfaction,” she wrote.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta called the high court’s action Monday “disappointing.” He also said the Supreme Court’s acceptance of the use of race as a factor in immigration enforcement was in tension with the court’s decision two years ago ruling out the use of race to promote diversity in college admissions.
“How they prevent the use of race to tackle discrimination, but allow the use of race to potentially discriminate is troubling and it is disturbing,” said Bonta, a Democrat.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration hailed the ruling lifting the court-imposed limits ICE faced in L.A. and several nearby counties.
“This is a win for the safety of Californians and the rule of law,” Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement. “DHS law enforcement will not be slowed down and will continue to arrest and remove the murderers, rapists, gang members, and other criminal illegal aliens… .”
In July, U.S. District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong ruled that ICE agents were conducting “roving patrols” of L.A. and making arrests without “reasonable suspicion” that their targets were in the country illegally. Instead, she found, they appeared to be relying on legally dubious factors such as race, accent and line of work that “seem no more indicative of illegal presence in the country than of legal presence.”
Frimpong, a Biden appointee, prohibited immigration officials in the L.A. area from using those criteria to choose targets for enforcement.
Kavanaugh noted that people who are illegally detained still have the right to sue for damages, but he said the judge’s order was vague enough that Immigration and Customs Enforcement personnel could be reluctant to do their jobs out of fear they could be accused of contempt.
“The prospect of such after-the-fact judicial second-guessing and contempt proceedings will inevitably chill lawful immigration enforcement efforts,” he wrote.
The Trump administration asked the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals to halt Frimpong’s order pending appeal, but a three-judge panel unanimously rejected that request, making only a small tweak in Frimpong’s directive.
The appeals judges also expressed concerns about reports that the White House set a quota of 3,000 immigration arrests per day and that such a target might be spurring unlawful arrests. The Justice Department denied to the court that any such quota existed, even though White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller confirmed the 3,000-arrest target in an interview on Fox News in May.
The “roving” raids Frimpong sought to rein in took place amid a broader battle over immigration enforcement in L.A., including Trump’s deployment of thousands of National Guard troops to the city over the objection of California Gov. Gavin Newsom. Another federal judge declared that deployment illegal, but that ruling was put on hold by the 9th Circuit. A separate ruling that those troops illegally engaged in law enforcement is on appeal.
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