When the President sent the National Guard and the Marines into Los Angeles last June ostensibly to enforce U.S. immigration laws, critics pounced on the move as a huge overreach in interpreting the law, calling it nothing more than racial profiling. Last Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a ruling validating the criticism.
The high court’s September 8th decision overruled a lower court that said the President’s muscular immigration crackdown “likely” violated the Fourth Amendment which bans “unreasonable searches and seizures.”
A lower court had earlier blocked ICE from making arrests based on four unique factors; race, ethnic background, language and location or employment. ICE raids had been targeting places like restaurants, Home Depot parking lots and agriculture sites, including farms and food processing plants.
The late summer ruling, done under what is called the ‘emergency docket’ or ‘shadow docket,’ is unlike when decisions are made when the Court is in scheduled session. A shadow docket decision usually does not include oral arguments or even signed opinions. They are also pauses for lower courts to hear the case.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh, in siding with the Court’s 6-3 majority, said that detaining individuals based upon the language they speak, their workplace, including “day labor, landscaping, agriculture and construction,” jobs that “do not require paperwork…and are especially attractive to illegal immigrants,” provides “reasonable suspicion of illegal presence in the United States.”
Justice Sandra Sotomayor’s dissent took aim at Kavanaugh’s permission slip allowing what he called ICE’s “brief stops” for questioning. Sotomayor said, “seizing people using firearms, physical violence and warehouse detentions,” or “being seized, taken from their jobs, and prevented from working to support themselves and their families,” is not something that should take place in our country. A low wage job or speaking Spanish, the Justice said, should not be license for stealing a person’s freedom.
But the September 8th SCOTUS ruling is just another high court victory for the President who has made immigration, not simply a cornerstone of his administration, but perhaps its most vitriolic rallying cry.
In a critical victory for Trump, the high court ruled in 2024 that former presidents cannot be prosecuted relating to the core powers of office. The decision goes back to the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol when Trump was indicted on four different counts related to the crime. The victories, critics say, have given Trump permission to instill fear in the immigrant community while, at the same time, reignite a lingering animus.
“They’re poisoning the blood of our country,” “destroying the blood or our country…destroying the fabric of our country,” are regular and loathsome expressions aimed at immigrants, (said who?)
When informed of the SCOTUS ruling, Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser reacted as both the state’s highest law enforcement officer and as someone intimately and painfully linked to the Holocaust. “My reaction was absolutely as a human being and as a child of refugees,” Weiser said. His grandmother, nine months pregnant at the time and a prisoner at Buchenwald, somehow survived when the Nazis fled as allied forces moved in. Alone, abandoned and in labor, his grandmother cut her own umbilical cord and gave birth to his mother.
But as Attorney General, Weiser saw the SCOTUS ruling, done quickly and quietly as unconstitutional. “Based on the language, the way you look,” he said, “I’m deeply concerned about the state of our republic.” Weiser said the ruling, which critics say will force Americans—particularly Black and Latino U.S. citizens—to carry documents proving citizenship. The President, along with the high court ruling, Weiser said, has created a “climate of fear.”
But even having the right documents or being born in this country has not saved scores of—especially Latinos—from arrest and detention. ICE officers—often masked and unaccountable—have routinely conducted raids on job sites and targeted entire workforces that have included native-born Americans.
Dallas attorney, Domingo Garcia, past president of LULAC, the League of Latin American Citizens, the largest and oldest Hispanic civil rights organization in the country, called the Supreme Court decision an abomination. “This is one of the worst decisions since Dred Scott,” an 18th century ruling that barred Scott, a former slave, from suing for his freedom because he was not considered a U.S. citizen. Garcia called the ruling “a gross violation of the bill of rights,” and gives authorities, including uniformed, masked agents, free reign and “making it legal to arrest people for driving while brown.” All Americans, he said, need to understand the stakes in this wave of state-sanctioned discrimination. “The battle,” he said, “will have to be won at the ballot box.”
Since June when he ordered the National Guard and the Marines to occupy a small district in Los Angeles the President has ordered the National Guard into New Orleans and threatened to deploy both it and U.S. forces into Chicago, Memphis and even Aurora.
These actions by the President, said Weiser, have placed the country in a delicate moment. “He has shown he doesn’t respect basic constitutional rights,” he said. “If we undermine (the Constitution), we won’t have a republic.”
