Not surprisingly given those extraordinary numbers, U.S. immigration officers have prioritized immigration enforcement in the Los Angeles area. The Government sometimes makes brief investigative stops to check the immigration status of those who gather in locations where people are hired for day jobs; who work or appear to work in jobs such as construction, landscaping, agriculture, or car washes that often do not require paperwork and are therefore attractive to illegal immigrants; and who do not speak much if any English. If the officers learn that the individual they stopped is a U.S. citizen or otherwise lawfully in the United
States, they promptly let the individual go. If the individual is illegally in the United States, the officers may arrest the individual and initiate the process for removal.
-- Justice Brett Kavanaugh, Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo, September 8, 2025
Today, the current, rogue U.S. Supreme Court, used the shadow docket to eviscerate the U.S. Constitution. In its continuing quest to empower Republican Fascism, the court lifted a lower court stay that had prevented the Trump-Noem DHS-ICE from stopping people and demanding their papers simply because they are brown, Spanish-speaking, or working class. This runs completely counter to the U.S. Constitution’s guarantees of equal protection of the laws, due process, and safety from unreasonable search and seizure — things Brett Kavanaugh neither understands nor cares about.
Furthermore, Kavanaugh’s statement quoted above indicates that he neither knows nor cares about what is on the public record already: the Trump regime has sent lawful residents of the U.S. to murderous penal camps in foreign countries. It has arrested and detained US citizens, subjecting them to the treatment the regime wholly intends for immigrants resident here. Ignoring Constitutional protections for some endangers everybody.
Kavanaugh objects to the lower court that ruled that the following are not Constitutional grounds for federal government immigration police to stop and detain people:
- presence at particular locations such as bus stops car washes, day laborer pickup sites, agricultural sites, and the like;
- the type of work one does
- speaking Spanish or speaking English with an accent;
- apparent race or ethnicity.
Kavanaugh claims that people already stopped and detained on such grounds don’t have a legitimate fear of that happening again. He thinks it is just too speculative to anticipate that the Trump-Noem DHS-ICE will keep it up. He also thinks that it is reasonable for the government to stop people and demand proof of their immigration status using these criteria. Further Kavanaugh thinks the only people with an interest in not being stopped for these reasons are people trying to stay in the U.S. illegally.
None of this is connected to reality or law or the U.S. Constitution. The Trump regime is using racial, ethnic, and linguistic profiling to terrorize citizens, non-citizens, lawfully present foreigners and not-lawfully present foreigners. Fascists terrorize all indiscriminately. It is how they gain and keep power, how they wield it against even a majority that does not embrace their overthrow of constitutional democracy.
As has been so often in the case since Donald Trump gained the White House in 2024, Justice Sonia Sotomayor tried to make it easy for her right wing colleagues to wake up and smell the roses. In her dissent, she recounts the actual facts of the ICE stops and sweeps that led the lower court to halt them. Sotomayor tells the world:
The Government, and now the concurrence, has all but declared that all Latinos, U. S. citizens or not, who work low wage jobs are fair game to be seized at any time, takenaway from work, and held until they provide proof of their legal status to the agents’ satisfaction.
She cites legal chapter and verse to make it clear that Constitution forbids the government from using factors applicable to large numbers of innocent people to justify stopping and searching anybody. The Constitution requires individualized suspicion of wrongdoing. Racial, ethnic, and linguistic profiling is not allowed.
But of course we already knew that Roberts, Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett are not interested in upholding the U.S. Constitution. As their rulings make plain, they are interested in shredding it.
Our job is to hamper them as best we can. We have to keep living the Constitution, using it at every opportunity to hamper, slow, and disrupt the Republican Fascist federal government. The unsung hero of the current moment is that lower court judge who issued the injunction against the Trump-Noem DHS-ICE unconstitutional and terroristic stops and sweeps. By standing by those who asserted their rights and sued the Trump regime for violating them, that judge put a temporary halt to some of ICE’s lawlessness. The plaintiffs and the lower court judge made a real difference. Some number of people were able to go about their business for a time, safe from being profiled and worse.
Now, in every state and U.S. territory we must all do likewise. In New Mexico - my home - we have made it possible for every single property owner to easily, affirmatively, and concretely assert their rights to keep federal agents from entering private areas of their residences and their businesses unless the agents have signed judicial warrants. These private spaces - which include private spaces in not-for-profit, religious, and educational institutions - are off limits to federal agents who have not supplied an affidavit to a court giving grounds for probable cause adequate enough to persuade the judge to give permission for a search. Businesses of every sort must protect these spaces, not only for brown, Spanish-speaking, or immigrant workers but for every last person in the United States. No individual is safe from a federal government headed by people who are shredding the Constitution. But by sticking together and insisting on what the Constitution guarantees each and all of us, we make it harder for those people and their minions to harm anybody for as long as we can stave them off. This is what each and everyone of us owes to on another, to ourselves, and to our country.
