Supreme Court Lifts ICE Racial Profiling Restrictions In Los Angeles – Blavity
The U.S. Supreme Court has allowed federal agents to stop people in Los Angeles based on race, language, employment or location in a new Monday ruling. In a 6–3 decision, the court lifted restrictions against this racial profiling, which immigration advocates say is a violation of the Fourth Amendment.
Why were racial profiling restrictions lifted?
After President Donald Trump launched mass deportation efforts across California, civil rights groups filed a lawsuit accusing the administration of illegally arresting thousands of people.
“Individuals with brown skin are approached or pulled aside by unidentified federal agents, suddenly and with a show of force and made to answer questions about who they are and where they are from,” the suit said, according to The New York Times.
Judge Maame E. Frimpong, of the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California then ordered ICE agents not to rely on the following factors when making an arrest: race or ethnicity, speaking Spanish or accented English, presence at a location such as a day-laborer or agricultural site, type of employment.
She pointed to a “mountain of evidence” of agents “indiscriminately rounding up numerous individuals without reasonable suspicion.”
A panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit refused to pause the order and the administration eventually appealed to the US Supreme Court.
“No one thinks that speaking Spanish or working in construction always creates reasonable suspicion. Nor does anyone suggest those are the only factors federal agents ever consider,” Solicitor General D. John Sauer said. “But in many situations, such factors — alone or in combination — can heighten the likelihood that someone is unlawfully present in the United States, above and beyond the 1-in-10 base line odds in the district.”
He also referred to Los Angeles as a judicial district that “harbors some two million illegal aliens out of its total population of nearly 20 million people, making it by far the largest destination for illegal aliens.”
Democratic elected officials are calling the ruling a loss of constitutional freedoms
Justice Sonia Sotomayor voted against the ruling: “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,” she said, according to The Guardian.
Mayor of Los Angeles Karen Bass aligned herself with Sotomayor, saying that Monday’s ruling “has now given the green light for law enforcement to profile and detain Angelenos based on their race”.
“I agree with her – I dissent,” Bass added. “We all dissent because from the beginning, we have known that Los Angeles has been used as a test case for total dominance and unchecked power by the federal government.”
California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who has taken a strong public stance against the Trump administration, denounced the decision as well.
“Trump’s hand-picked Supreme Court majority just became the Grand Marshal for a parade of racial terror in Los Angeles,” he said. “Trump’s private police force now has a green light to come after your family – and every person is now a target. … But we will continue fighting these abhorrent attacks on Californians.”
Monday’s ruling comes as the Department of Homeland Security announced it has started a new immigration operation in Chicago on Monday and as the National Guard was deployed in DC.
The post Supreme Court Lifts ICE Racial Profiling Restrictions In Los Angeles appeared first on Blavity.
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