The Supreme Court again supported the Trump administration on Monday, ruling that immigration agents in Southern California carry out raids and other aggressive methods.
The ruling has sparked controversy due to the fact that the ruling allows the targeting of individuals for deportation based on their race or language.
The Department of Justice had petitioned the Court to put a prior ruling on hold that prohibited agents from stopping and detaining people without a “reasonable suspicion” that they are illegally in the country without using race, ethnicity, language, or an accent, among other factors.
California Governor Gavin Newsom, a staunch critic of Trump and the administration, lambasted the Court’s decision.
“Trump’s hand-picked Supreme Court majority just became the grand marshal for a parade of racial terror in Los Angeles,” Newsom said in a statement. “This isn’t about enforcing immigration laws – it’s about targeting Latinos and anyone who doesn’t look or sound like Stephen Miller’s idea of an American,” he continued.
The SCOTUS ruling is not final. The ruling lifts the previous federal judge’s order while a lawsuit brought by a group of Latino people who were caught in the raids goes through the legal process.
The proposed class-action case includes a mix of non-citizens and U.S. citizens.
“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 states.
The ACLU is assisting the plaintiffs in their claim.
The three Liberal judges, Brown-Jackson, Sotomayor, and Kagan dissented from the majority, with Sotomayor authoring the dissenting opinion.
“To start, the record reflects the Government’s systematic operation to target broad segments of the population based on race and ethnicity, language, location, and occupation,” she wrote. “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. Today, the Court needlessly subjects countless more to these exact same indignities.,” she continued.
Justice Kavanaugh, a Conservative, noted that “apparent ethnicity alone cannot furnish reasonable suspicion,” but may be a “relevant factor” when combined with other key factors.
The Trump administration vowed to quickly re-start “roving patrols.”
Department of Justice head Attorney General Pam Bondi called the ruling a “massive victory” and said that immigration enforcement officers can work “without judicial micromanagement.”
