The Supreme Court rode to the rescue of President Trump’s immigration crackdown on Monday by giving a green light to the kinds of aggressive tactics ICE used in its “mass deportation” arrests in Los Angeles earlier this year.
The justices put on hold lower court rulings that held that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement was violating the Constitution when it used race, ethnicity, language and location as factors in determining whom to question about their legal status.
Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh said indicators such as ethnicity cannot be the sole consideration but can be a “relevant factor” when considered with others.
“Under this court’s precedents, not to mention common sense, those circumstances taken together can constitute at least reasonable suspicion of illegal presence in the United States,” he wrote in an opinion explaining his reasoning.
The ruling delivers a significant win to the administration, which had complained that lower courts were intruding deeply into the government’s ability to carry out Mr. Trump’s plans for mass deportations.
The Department of Homeland Security said the decision vindicated its operations.
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“This is a win for the safety of Californians and the rule of law,” said Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom declared the ruling the result of “Trump’s handpicked Supreme Court majority” and predicted a “parade of racial terror” in Los Angeles.
“Trump’s private police force now has a green light to come after your family,” he said.
Los Angeles became ground zero for Mr. Trump’s mass deportation effort in early June, when the government surged manpower to conduct arrests. The community erupted in riots.
Those deployments have drawn legal challenges that are winding through the courts.
The ICE tactics case, meanwhile, addresses the heart of how and when immigration officers can approach suspects.
Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong, a Biden appointee to the court in Los Angeles, cited news reports to conclude that ICE and other federal agents deputized to help were targeting people because they spoke Spanish or were working or hanging out at car washes. She said that was not sufficient for “reasonable suspicion” to make a law enforcement stop.
She issued an injunction blocking ICE from making arrests that she said would violate the Fourth Amendment’s ban on unreasonable stops and searches.
The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld her ruling, saying ICE has been too secretive about what it considers valid justification for a stop. The judges said the evidence they had seen, largely from news accounts, was not compelling justification.
U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer, defending Mr. Trump, told the Supreme Court that those lower rulings muddied the waters, making it unclear what sort of enforcement ICE can carry out and leaving all ICE officers worried they could face punishment for stopping someone.
He said officers must have some leeway, particularly in the Los Angeles area, which is home to the country’s largest concentration of illegal immigrants.
“The district court’s injunction now significantly interferes with federal enforcement efforts across a region that is larger and more populous than many countries and that has become a major epicenter of the immigration crisis,” he said.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor issued a searing dissent from Monday’s ruling. She said her colleagues were creating an exception to established Fourth Amendment norms when it came to “those who happen to look a certain way, speak a certain way and appear to work a certain type of legitimate job.”
“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,” she wrote. She was joined by the court’s other two Democratic appointees.
Justice Sotomayor labeled ICE’s action in Los Angeles “raids.” ICE vehemently rejects that term.
She also broke with the Supreme Court justices’ practice of saying they “respectfully dissent” from a ruling. Instead, twice, she flatly said, “I dissent.”
Justice Kavanaugh said the court couldn’t side with the challengers for multiple reasons.
For one, he said, they likely lacked standing because they couldn’t prove they were liable to be targeted in future immigration actions and certainly couldn’t prove they would be stopped only because of their ethnicity or location.
He said they can sue for damages after the fact if they are wrongly stopped, but not as a preemptive measure.
He said the government likely has the better of the Fourth Amendment arguments, given the realities of illegal immigration and Los Angeles.
He defended ICE’s approach using a “totality” of circumstances.
“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,” Justice Kavanaugh wrote.
He said if Justice Sotomayor were to prevail, it would mean sidestepping or overturning several Supreme Court precedents.
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass said the ruling would reverberate nationwide, affecting “every person in every city.”
“This decision will lead to more working families being torn apart and fear of the very institutions meant to protect — not persecute — our people,” she said.
Soon after the court’s ruling, ICE announced a deportation “blitz” in Chicago. It said the city’s sanctuary policies are protecting illegal immigrant criminals.
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.
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