In a decision that sent shockwaves through immigrant communities across California and beyond, the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday gave federal immigration agents the green light to stop and arrest people based on how they look, the language they speak, or the type of work they do.
The ruling came through the Court’s shadow docket — its emergency pipeline for fast-tracked decisions that skip public hearings and full written opinions. Without providing any explanation, the Court overturned a lower judge’s order that had barred ICE from targeting people in the Los Angeles area using racial and language-based profiling.
The Trump administration had pushed for the Supreme Court to intervene, calling the judge’s restrictions a “straitjacket” on enforcement in a region at the heart of the administration’s immigration crackdown.
The case traces back to U.S. District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong, who issued an injunction in July after hearing from people stopped by ICE in what they described as unconstitutional “roving patrols.” The judge — appointed by President Biden — agreed that the plaintiffs had shown credible evidence that ICE was violating the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unreasonable searches and seizures.
Her ruling blocked ICE from conducting stops or arrests in the Central District of California — home to over 20 million people — based on four factors: a person’s race, speaking Spanish, doing certain jobs, or being in locations where undocumented immigrants are known to gather.
That protection is now gone.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh, writing a 10-page concurring opinion, said the plaintiffs likely don’t even have a legal right to sue and predicted the administration would ultimately win the case.
“To conclude otherwise, this Court would likely have to overrule or significantly narrow two separate lines of precedents,” Kavanaugh wrote.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in a scathing dissent joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, warned the ruling opens the door to racial profiling on a massive scale.
“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. “Rather than stand idly by while our constitutional freedoms are lost, I dissent.”
She also criticized the Court’s use of the shadow docket to push through such a major policy shift without proper scrutiny.
“That decision is yet another grave misuse of our emergency docket,” Sotomayor added.
Solicitor General D. John Sauer, arguing for the Trump administration, said the judge’s order was tying ICE’s hands.
“Especially in an area where 1 in 10 people are present illegally, it defies common sense to hold that the government cannot use these factors to meet that low bar,” Sauer wrote.
The plaintiffs — represented by the ACLU and other advocacy groups — said the Court’s move effectively legalizes racial profiling in one of the most diverse parts of the country. They warned that U.S. citizens and lawful residents alike could now be swept up in an ICE dragnet simply for looking Latino or speaking Spanish in public.
“The district court broke no new legal ground,” they told the Court. “It simply applied long-standing constitutional principles.”
Los Angeles and several other cities backed the plaintiffs, citing President Reagan’s famous “shining city upon a hill” speech in their briefs.
“Those are the principles on which this nation was founded, and on which it has flourished,” they wrote. “Yet now our federal government tells this Court that anyone in the United States — including American citizens — can be stopped, and even detained, based on ‘apparent ethnicity.’”
The Supreme Court’s order is yet another win for the Trump administration at the highest court in the land, which has repeatedly stepped in to revive parts of the president’s immigration agenda halted by lower courts.
For now, immigration authorities in California have a green light to resume using race, language, and employment status as reasons to detain people — a move critics say tears at the fabric of constitutional protections and civil liberties.
If you’re in the wrong place, speaking the wrong language, or simply look like you don’t belong — ICE can stop you. And the Supreme Court just said that’s okay.
