Supreme Court Lifts ICE Migrant Profiling Ban in LA for Now (3)

Federal immigration agents in Los Angeles can resume using tactics for now that critics say amount to racial profiling, after the US Supreme Court backed the Trump administration’s aggressive enforcement efforts.

Over three dissents from the court’s liberal-leaning justices, the conservative majority on Monday put on hold a federal district court order that barred Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents from questioning and detaining people based solely on their ethnicity, language, occupation or presence at a particular location.

The Supreme Court’s order will apply while the legal fight continues.

The majority of justices didn’t issue a joint opinion explaining the decision. Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote separately that he believed the Trump administration is likely to win the case, either on its argument that the challengers lacked legal grounds to argue for broad, future-looking court intervention or the underlying claim that the stops are unconstitutional.

“To be clear, apparent ethnicity alone cannot furnish reasonable suspicion,” Kavanaugh wrote. “Under this court’s case law regarding immigration stops, however, it can be a ‘relevant factor’ when considered along with other salient factors.” He acknowledged this could result in US citizens or other individuals with legal status being stopped, but they would be “free to go after the brief encounter.”

WATCH: President Donald Trump speaks Monday on sending National Guard troops to patrol US cities.

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Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, dissented, writing that she would not “stand idly by while our constitutional freedoms are lost.”

“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,” Sotomayor wrote. She said the result is that Latinos, US citizens or not, “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.”

‘Massive Victory’

Attorney General Pam Bondi said in a social media post that the administration’s “massive victory” meant immigration enforcement officers “can continue carrying out roving patrols in California without judicial micromanagement.”

Cecillia Wang, national legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, part of the legal team representing the challengers, said in a statement that the order “puts people at grave risk” and that the organization will “fight on in this case and others for our fundamental right to go about our lives without being targeted by government agents based on racial profiling.”

“For anyone perceived as Latino by an ICE agent, this means living in a fearful ‘papers please’ regime, with risks of violent ICE arrests and detention,” Wang said. “The Supreme Court’s order is outrageous because it includes no reasoning itself but puts on hold the well-reasoned opinions of the lower federal courts.”

The Supreme Court has largely supported President Donald Trump’s far-reaching immigration agenda, including what he has called the “single largest Mass Deportation Program in History.” Critics say the push is sweeping up US citizens, including two plaintiffs in the case who say they were forcibly detained by agents in separate incidents in June.

US District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong’s July 11 order was designed to end the indiscriminate targeting of migrants at places where they tend to work or look for day labor, including car washes and Home Depot parking lots.

The judge pointed to a “mountain of evidence” that agents were violating the Constitution, including the Fourth Amendment ban on unreasonable searches and seizures. The order, which also applied to the US Border Patrol, came in a lawsuit by Southern California residents, workers and advocacy groups.

It’s not clear how effective Frimpong’s order was. Days after a federal appeals court backed the district judge, agents arrested more than a dozen people at a Los Angeles Home Depot.

Reasonable Suspicion

The Trump administration told the Supreme Court that Frimpong was wrong to categorically bar agents from relying on legitimate indications that someone might be in the country illegally.

“Needless to say, no one thinks that speaking Spanish or working in construction always creates reasonable suspicion,” argued US Solicitor General D. John Sauer, the administration’s top Supreme Court lawyer. “But in many situations, such factors — alone or in combination — can heighten the likelihood that someone is unlawfully present in the United States.”

Sauer also said Frimpong went too far by applying her order to the entire California judicial district that includes Los Angeles. And Sauer contended the organizations and individuals pressing the case lacked legal standing to seek a sweeping court order restricting federal agents.

The challengers urged the Supreme Court to leave Frimpong’s order in force, saying they “face an imminent and substantial risk of being stopped again by a roving government patrol based only on demographic profiling.”

The judge’s decision “broke no new ground,” the challengers argued. The order “does not prevent the government from enforcing the immigration laws, conducting consensual encounters, or relying on any or all of the four factors along with other facts to form reasonable suspicion.”

The case is Noem v. Perdomo, 25A169.

(Updated with comment from the ACLU.)

--With assistance from Alicia A. Caldwell.

To contact the reporters on this story:
Greg Stohr in Washington at gstohr@bloomberg.net;
Zoe Tillman in Washington at ztillman2@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story:
Elizabeth Wasserman at ewasserman2@bloomberg.net

Sara Forden

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