| As President Donald Trump ramps up immigration raids, officers in Los Angeles have been searching parking lots, workplaces and schools and detaining people they suspect might be undocumented, sometimes when those people look Latino. This week, the Supreme Court said those raids, despite evidence of indiscriminate targeting of people based on their race, are okay for now. The liberal justices vehemently disagreed. “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,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in the dissent. “Rather than stand idly by while our constitutional freedoms are lost, I dissent.” It’s a remarkable case for three reasons that could have implications in other cities, as the Trump administration launches raids in Hispanic areas of Chicago. 1. Did the Supreme Court just okay racial profiling? The question the Supreme Court considered: Were Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents violating people’s constitutional rights when they swarmed a car wash in L.A., wearing masks and no identification, and rounded people up without asking for their IDs? The Constitution bans searches and seizures that invade people’s privacy. Legal experts say it applies to anyone in the United States, regardless of immigration status or perceived immigration status. Two lower courts said ICE likely detained people based on race. “If you’re an ICE agent, you need reasonable suspicion [to search someone]. We all agree,” said Jessica Levinson, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles and host of the “Passing Judgment” podcast. But the Supreme Court ruled this week that ICE was likely within the law and allowed agents to continue using race as a factor in immigration raids. The justices didn’t rule on the merits — that could come later. Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh offered some explanation for the ruling: “To be clear, apparent ethnicity alone cannot furnish reasonable suspicion; under this Court’s case law regarding immigration stops, however, it can be a ‘relevant factor’ when considered along with other salient factors.” “What Kavanaugh is saying is, if you look at the totality of circumstances and number of people who are in Los Angeles and not here with proper documentation … it’s enough to say race and ethnicity, plus something else. Are you speaking with an accent? Or in Spanish? Where you are in the city and what work you are performing?” Levinson said. “And Sotomayor is saying that’s not enough: She is saying you get to round people up based on the color of skin and language you’re speaking and where they’re situated, and that’s tantamount to racial profiling.” The Supreme Court’s ruling is a different reading of the law from how Jeremy Fogel, a former judge who now heads the Berkley Judicial Institute, understands it and applied it when he was a judge. “There’s long-standing Supreme Court precedent that to deprive somebody of their liberty, even briefly, you have to have something specific about them,” said Fogel. “It can’t just be, ‘He looks like he’s Latino and he’s speaking Spanish and he’s working at a car wash.’ That’s generic, not specific to an individual.” “ICE has to feel pretty emboldened today,” Levinson said. 2. The immigration raids are already politically controversial Trump was elected to do four things, says Whit Ayres, a Republican consultant: “To bring down inflation, to juice the economy, to stop illegal immigration and to get away from woke culture.” He has been acting aggressively on all of the above, Ayres added, but particularly so on immigration. There’s evidence Americans are starting to dislike what they see: As raids ramped up, polling shows his handling of immigration has gone from one of his strongest issues to one where a majority of Americans now disapprove. Ayres says he’s watching for how Hispanic and Black men who voted for Trump react to the raids in their community. Politicians are recommending that people who look like immigrants carry identification out and about. “I’m deeply concerned, particularly for people who have partial documentation, who are here legally but they may not be U.S. citizens, right?” Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker (D) told NPR. “I’m particularly worried for them because nothing that they will carry will be good enough for ICE.” 3. Supreme Court continues to give the president extraordinary power The court has yet to rule on the merits of much of what Trump is doing, but the conservative justices routinely sided with the president in early rulings: It’s allowed Trump to fire federal officials without apparent cause, cut hundreds of millions of congressional funding and dismantle entire federal agencies on his own — often overruling lower courts who said these actions likely violated the law. Fogel said that the Supreme Court has made significant decisions through emergency rulings where the justices haven’t held arguments and typically don’t explain their rationale. It’s unclear why, and it’s led to confusion in the lower courts about what the law actually says about presidential power. Kavanaugh provided his views in this case, but there’s nothing in his opinion about what the other justices who agreed with him about the outcome were thinking and why. “If you’re going to make meaningful changes like this in the law, I think it’s important for public confidence that the legal analysis and rationale be clear and transparent,” Fogel said. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said in May that the job of the courts is to be independent and “check the excesses of Congress or the executive.” But the Supreme Court’s critics see a judicial system unwilling to stand up to a president trying to limit the other branches’ power. “In the face of the most aggressive expansion of peacetime presidential authority in history, the justices have — with just a few notable exceptions — squirmed and wriggled to avoid confronting the White House,” wrote Michael Waldman, head of the Brennan Center for Justice. | 
