Supreme Court Greenlights Racial Profiling in Los Angeles
“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
The Supreme Court’s order this week in Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo has thrown open the door to something every American should fear. Federal immigration agents in Los Angeles are now allowed to stop and detain people based on the color of their skin, the way they speak, the work they do, and where they gather. This ruling strips away fundamental protections under the Fourth Amendment and resurrects the ugliest chapters of our past.
The order stayed a lower court decision that had barred agents from seizing people based on four factors: apparent race or ethnicity, speaking Spanish or accented English, standing in certain locations like car washes or bus stops, and performing jobs like construction or landscaping. Those are not markers of crime. Those are markers of life. Millions of lawful residents and American citizens fit those exact descriptions every single day.
Justice Sotomayor, joined by Justices Kagan and Jackson, put it bluntly. She warned that the Court’s majority has forced an entire class of citizens “to the indignity of having to carry documentation to prove that they deserve to walk freely.” She called the order “unconscionably irreconcilable with our Nation’s constitutional guarantees.”
She furthermore said in her dissent:
“The Fourth Amendment protects every individual’s constitutional right to be ‘free from arbitrary interference by law officers.’ After today, that may no longer be true for those who happen to look a certain way, speak a certain way, and appear to work a certain type of legitimate job that pays very little. Because this is unconscionably irreconcilable with our Nation’s constitutional guarantees, I dissent.”
She is right.
This is not an abstract debate. In June, armed and masked agents stormed car washes, farms, tow yards, and bus stops across Los Angeles. Citizens were thrown against fences, handcuffed, and hauled away until they produced papers that satisfied the government. One man was asked three times if he was American, then pressed for the name of the hospital where he was born. When he hesitated, an agent racked his rifle. That man was a U.S. citizen. These are not isolated events. They are patterns.
As a lawyer, I know the Constitution requires individualized suspicion. The Fourth Amendment was written to protect us from arbitrary government power. In United States v. Brignoni-Ponce, 422 U.S. 873 (1975), the Supreme Court held that Mexican ancestry alone does not establish reasonable suspicion for immigration stops. The Court explained that “apparent Mexican ancestry” could be considered as one factor among many, but it cannot by itself justify stopping a vehicle or questioning an individual about immigration status.
This country has lived through dark chapters when entire groups were treated as suspicious simply for existing together. During the Jim Crow era, laws against “unlawful assembly” were used to arrest Black men and women for nothing more than standing in groups on street corners, a tool designed to keep communities in fear and strip them of dignity.
In World War II, Chinese Americans were often swept up in raids and interrogations, forced to carry papers proving their right to be here, echoing the discriminatory laws that once excluded Chinese immigrants from entering the country at all. At the same time, Japanese Americans were rounded up and interned, their loyalty questioned solely on ancestry. Each of these episodes was later recognized as a shameful violation of constitutional rights, a warning of how quickly fear and prejudice corrode liberty.
Yet despite the Constitution and this past history, in 2025, under Donald Trump’s second term, our highest court is allowing agents to do exactly what the Constitution forbids and what we once determined was shameful.
The effect is predictable. Families will live in fear. People will avoid work, school, and even public spaces because they fear being stopped for looking or sounding a certain way. Entire communities will be treated as suspects, not citizens. We are telling our neighbors who speak Spanish at home that they need to carry papers to prove their freedom in their own country. That is not America.
This is also a warning about power. Today it is Latino citizens in Los Angeles. Tomorrow it could be anyone who looks or sounds different from what those in power decide is acceptable. If the government can suspend your rights because of your accent or the job you do, then no right is safe.
I am angry because the Court knows better. Justice Kavanaugh tried to minimize the harm, calling the questioning “typically brief.” Tell that to the man shoved against a fence with a rifle pointed at him. Tell that to the day laborers gassed at a Home Depot. A free society cannot measure freedom in minutes of questioning. Freedom is either protected or it is not.
You deserve better than a government that treats entire communities as suspects. You deserve leaders who defend the Constitution, not bend it. You deserve a Court that stands with people, not power. This fight is about whether your children and grandchildren will inherit a country that lives by its promise of liberty and justice for all.
The order is temporary, but its damage is real. It sends a message that racial profiling is acceptable in America. It tells citizens they must prove their right to exist freely. That is why we cannot be silent. This is the moment to raise your voice, to vote, and to demand leaders who will protect the rights of every American.
Our Constitution does not belong to one president, one administration, or one Court. It belongs to you. And it is worth fighting for.
Mitch Jackson, Esq. | links
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Frightening on one hand, expected on the other. Judicial hypocrisy to the max from Anita Thomas, Christine "I Love Beer" Kavanaugh, Neil Notsomuch, Amy Conehead Barrett, Samuel "Pray to Heaven and Blame The Wife" Alito and John "Hardly the Gospel" Roberts. The only thing supreme about this group is their level of corruption and fealty to Trump..