By Wendy Fry and Sergio Olmos, CalMatters
This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters.The U.S. Supreme Court today granted the Trump governance’s emergency request to lift a temporary restraining order barring federal immigration officials from conducting “roving patrols” and profiling people based on their appearance in Los Angeles and Southern California.
The case is likely to have an enormous impact, not just for los Angeles but across the country, several experts told CalMatters. It means immigration agents can legally resume aggressive street sweeps that began in early June in Los Angeles, the epicenter for President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign.
The Supreme Court, by a 6-3 majority, agreed with the Trump administration that federal immigration officers can briefly detain and interrogate individuals about whether they are lawfully in the United States and that they can rely on a “totality of circumstances” standard for reasonable suspicion. That means everything the officer knew and observed at the time of the stop.
The U.S. Supreme court took the case through its emergency docket,also known as the shadow docket,which is used for cases that are handled speedily with limited briefing and typically no oral argument. The justices relied on briefs from the Trump administration and from California government officials.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote an opinion explaining his reasoning in lifting restrictions on Los Angeles immigration sweeps. “Here, those circumstances include: that there is an extremely high number and percentage of illegal immigrants in the Los Angeles area; that those individuals tend to gather in certain locations to seek daily work; that those individuals often work in certain kinds of jobs, such as day labor, landscaping, agriculture, and construction, that do not require paperwork and are therefore especially attractive to illegal immigrants; and that many of those illegally in the Los Angeles area come from Mexico or Central America and do not speak much English,” he wrote.
“To be clear,” he continued,”ethnicity alone cannot furnish reasonable suspicion; under this Court’s case law regarding immigration stops,however,it can be a ‘relevant factor’ when considered with other salient factors.”
The three justices appointed by Democratic presidents dissented from the majority, stressing that they objected to the court lifting limitations on immigration sweeps without oral argument and through the emergency docket, which the Trump administration used extensively this year.
The Supreme Court has sided with Trump in at least 17 cases in a row now.
“That decision is yet another grave misuse of our emergency docket,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in the dissent. “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.”
Los Angeles and dozens of other Southern California municipalities wrote in an amicus brief supporting the restraining order that, because of the population makeup, “half the population of the Central District” meets the federal government’s criteria for being stopped and questioned about their immigration status. it means officers can rely on little more than a person is located in the parking lot of a home Depot and speaking Spanish to question them.