1 of 5 | Demonstrators march to the Metropolitan Detention Center during a protest against ICE and immigration raids in Los Angeles on June 8. File Photo by Jim Ruymen/UPI | License Photo
Sept. 8 (UPI) — The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday overturned a lower court’s rulings blocking federal immigration officials from conducting raids in California seen by critics as unconstitutional racial profiling.
The high court voted 6-3 in favor of lifting temporary restraining orders preventing Immigration and Customs Enforcement from carrying out the raids.
Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong issued two restraining orders in July, saying roving patrols “indiscriminately” rounded up people without reasonable suspicion, a violation of the Fourth Amendment. She also said that ICE denied the individuals access to lawyers, a violation of the Fifth Amendment.
Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, writing for the majority, said it was reasonable to question people gathered in places seeking day work, landscaping, agriculture, construction and other types of jobs that don’t require paperwork and are therefor attractive to undocumented immigrants. He said reasonable suspicion cannot rely alone on ethnicity, but he called it a “relevant factor.”
“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,” Kavanaugh wrote.
The three dissenters — Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson — agreed with civil rights activists who said that ICE’s approach of questioning people who appear to be of Hispanic origin or work in certain jobs would target many U.S. citizens and legal immigrants.
“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,” Sotomayor wrote in her dissent. “Rather than stand idly by while our constitutional freedoms are lost, I dissent.”
