WASHINGTON—By a 6-3 party-line vote, the GOP-named majority on the U.S. Supreme Court, this week, turned President Donald Trump’s ICE agents loose to prey upon not just Latinos but eventually everyone else in the United States. The ruling allows ICE to continue its rolling Los Angeles raids, including the kidnapping and disappearance of brown people, poor people looking for low-paid work at home repair outlets, restaurant workers, and many others. Opponents of the ruling see it as a threat to people everywhere across the United States.
The three Democratic-named justices, led by Sonia Sotomayor, the court’s sole jurist of Latin American ancestry, hit the roof. The AFL-CIO, in its BlueSky tweet, also hit the roof. UnidosUS—formerly the National Council of La Raza Unida—joined them in their outrage as did a broad array of pro-labor and progressive forces.
“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,” Justice Sotomayor declared.
“The court has put the civil rights of every person in the United States at risk,” declared Janet Murguia, president of UnidosUS, formerly the National Council of La Raza Unida.
“We condemn the Supreme Court’s decision to allow federal agents to profile people based on how we look, the language we speak, and the type of work we do. This is a dangerous attack on workers’ freedoms in Los Angeles and across the country, and our solidarity will not waver!” the AFL-CIO tweeted.
“It’s writing racism and fascism into law,” a musician who identified himself as MarkVDH tweeted. “Another …ruling that has no place in a democracy. The Roberts court has shown their hand again, continuing to light the Constitution on fire. They deserve no legitimacy. Corrupt to the core. Justice Sotomayor’s dissent is scathing and accurate.”
“SCOTUS: Considering race as one factor in a college applicant’s file is blatantly unconstitutional,” tweeted Steven Mazzie, referring to High Court rulings against affirmative action in college admissions. “ALSO SCOTUS: Considering race as one factor in targeting whom to detain and deport is cool, cool, cool.”
Tweeter ArthurXb put it even more bluntly: “Roberts joins the Taney court,” he wrote.
That links current Chief Justice John Roberts, one of the six on the majority decision, to Chief Justice Roger Taney and his infamous 1857 Dred Scott decision, saying Blacks were not citizens and had no rights at all. Dred Scott sped up the approaching Civil War.
The court majority, Murguia elaborated, “undermines constitutional protections and opens the door to more indiscriminate stops and arrests. It authorizes targeting by authorities that makes all immigrants, Hispanics, and other non-white Americans suspects simply because of the color of their skin or the language they speak.
“These types of tactics have already traumatized families, violated fundamental rights, and led to the wrongful detention of U.S. citizens and other lawful residents. This decision gives a green light to discriminatory enforcement.”
The court, she added, without a proper explanation, “signaled the administration can, with impunity, use profiling-based tactics nationwide.” Murguia urged Congress to legislate, overruling the decision—an unlikely prospect.
Sotomayor produced a long list of incidents where ICE agents trapped, manhandled, tear-gassed, strong-armed, grabbed and deported anyone with brown skin. She quoted the Trump regime’s Border Patrol chief agent in L.A. as declaring his “division will ‘turn and burn’ and ‘go even harder now…chasing, cuffing, and deporting’ people at car washes.”
All of which is blatantly unconstitutional, Justice Sotomayor wrote.
Says suspicion should be proved
Trump’s ICE had to prove it had reasonable suspicion to stop someone,” but the majority justices forced that proof “onto an entire class of citizens to carry enough documentation to prove they deserve to walk freely,” Justice Sotomayor added.
“The Constitution does not permit the creation of such a second-class citizenship. Countless people in the Los Angeles area have been grabbed, thrown to the ground, and handcuffed simply because of their looks, their accents, and the fact they make a living by doing manual labor.”
The ICE agents’ seizures of people have spread beyond Los Angeles, where the case occurred. U.S. District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong “found these (ICE) raids were part of a pattern of conduct by the government that likely violated the Fourth Amendment,” Justice Sotomayor declared. Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson joined her dissent.
“Based on the evidence,” ICE “was stopping individuals based solely on four factors: (1) Their apparent race or ethnicity (2) Whether they spoke Spanish or English with an accent (3) The type of location at which they were found (such as a car wash or bus stop) and (4) The type of job they appeared to work,” Justice Sotomayor wrote.
Even when combining all four factors, stopping and trapping people “could not satisfy the Fourth Amendment’s requirement of reasonable suspicion,” so the U.S. District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong temporarily stopped ICE hunts and “its pattern of unlawful mass arrests.” The court majority overturned her decision.
The six-justice majority did not issue its own reasoning for turning Trump’s ICE agents loose. But one, Trump-named Justice Brett Kavanaugh, issued a concurring opinion. Justice Kavanaugh tried to justify the legality of Trump’s ICE agents beating, arresting and manhandling people by claiming one of every 10 Angelenos, some two million people in the metro area, is an “illegal alien.”
That justified dragging people out of cars and restaurants, detaining and deporting tens of thousands of them—migrant or not and citizen or not–because of what they look like, said Justice Kavanaugh.
U.S. District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong ordered ICE to halt, but the Trump regime took an emergency appeal to the High Court to overrule her. Justice Kavanaugh explained their reasoning in a concurrence. It outraged Justice Sotomayor.
The ICE agents may “interrogate any alien or person believed to be an alien as to his right to be or to remain in the United States…based on specific articulable facts,” Justice Kavanaugh wrote. Those facts include limited English knowledge, work in low-paying jobs—such as construction, landscaping, farming or as day laborers—that don’t require papers, or that rounding them up “is in the public interest.”
And Justice Kavanaugh claimed that when people the ICE agents detain prove they’re U.S. citizens, the agents let them go. That’s in direct contradiction to the facts on the ground in L.A., and Sotomayor listed incident after incident after incident. ICE uses the same violence anywhere else it operates, including D.C., Chicago, and New York.
Almost every day, at least one or more of the right-wing justices on the Supreme Court show their disdain for the Constitution and their fealty to Donald Trump. In an interview on Fox News this week, Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett refused to say that the Constitution bans Trump from seeking a fourth term. She hemmed and hawed when asked if it did and instead noted that Franklin D. Roosevelt had four terms because of the war emergency during World War II.
Ominously, Trump has said that talk about a possible third term is not a “joke.” When he met with Ukraine’s President Zelensky at the White House recently, he made a point of noting that Zelensky cancelled elections in his country because it was at war.
What both Trump and Justice Barrett failed to mention is that, since the time of Roosevelt, the amended U.S. Constitution forbids more than two terms even in case of war.
We hope you appreciated this article. At People’s World, we believe news and information should be free and accessible to all, but we need your help. Our journalism is free of corporate influence and paywalls because we are totally reader-supported. Only you, our readers and supporters, make this possible. If you enjoy reading People’s World and the stories we bring you, please support our work by donating or becoming a monthly sustainer today. Thank you!
CONTRIBUTOR
