The US supreme court has again backed president Donald Trump’s hardline immigration approach, letting agents proceed with southern California raids targeting people for deportation based on their race or language.
The court granted a justice department request to put on hold a judge’s order temporarily barring agents from stopping or detaining people without “reasonable suspicion” that they are in the country illegally, by relying on race or ethnicity, or if they speak Spanish or English with an accent, among other factors. The administration quickly vowed to continue “roving patrols”.
The supreme court’s three liberal justices publicly dissented, directing pointed criticism at its conservative majority.
The administration “has all but declared that all Latinos, US citizens or not, who work low-wage jobs 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”, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in the dissenting opinion.
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“Rather than stand idly by while our constitutional freedoms are lost, I dissent,” she added.
Los Angeles-based US district judge Maame Frimpong found on July 11th that the Trump administration’s actions likely violated the US constitution’s fourth amendment protection against unreasonable searches and seizures. The judge’s order applied to her court’s jurisdiction covering much of southern California.
The supreme court’s order was brief and issued without any explanation – a common way it handles emergency matters, but one that has generated confusion in lower courts and criticism from some of the justices themselves. The court has a 6-3 conservative majority.
Trump-appointed attorney general Pam Bondi called Monday’s decision a “massive victory”, writing on social media that immigration enforcement officers now can “continue carrying out roving patrols in California without judicial micromanagement”.
A lawsuit challenging the raids accused the administration of using roving patrols by masked and heavily armed agents who have conducted interrogations and detentions based on racial profiling that resemble “brazen, midday kidnappings”.
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“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 lawsuit stated.
A group of Latino people caught up in the raids, including some who are US citizens, filed the proposed class action lawsuit in Los Angeles federal court in July.
Concurring with Monday’s decision, conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh said that “apparent ethnicity alone cannot furnish reasonable suspicion” but it can be a “‘relevant factor’ when considered along with other salient factors”.
“If the officers learn that the individual they stopped is a US citizen or otherwise lawfully in the United States, they promptly let the individual go.”
In a written filing, the justice department defended targeting people using a “reasonably broad profile” in a region where, according to the administration, about 10 per cent of residents are in the country illegally.
Mr Trump’s administration has repeatedly asked the supreme court this year to allow it to proceed with policies that lower courts have impeded after casting doubt on their legality.
The court has backed Mr Trump in most of these cases. It has allowed his administration to deport migrants to countries other than their own without offering a chance to show harms they may face and to revoke temporary legal status previously granted by the government on humanitarian grounds to hundreds of thousands of migrants. – Reuters
