Justice Sonia Sotomayor issued a scathing dissent to Monday’s Supreme Court ruling authorizing immigration agents’ use of racial profiling, saying it’s “unconscionably irreconcilable” with the U.S. Constitution.
“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.
Her dissent is peppered with documented instances of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Los Angeles this year using physical force to stop people they suspected of being in the U.S. illegally because of their location, jobs, apparent race or spoken language.
“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,” she continued. “Today, the Court needlessly subjects countless more to these exact same indignities.”
President Donald Trump’s administration, and now the nation’s highest court, have 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, taken away from work, and held until they provide proof of their legal status to the agents’ satisfaction,” Sotomayor wrote in her response to Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s opinion for the 6-3 decision.
The case, filed in part by individuals ICE stopped during immigration raids, came before the high court after a U.S. district judge found that the raids had violated the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unreasonable searches and seizures by the government. The Trump administration appealed the decision, and the conservative-majority court ― which includes three justices picked by Trump ― took it on its as part of its emergency, or “shadow,” docket last month.
In her dissent, Sotomayor called out Kavanaugh directly for characterizing the ICE raids in his opinion as “brief stops for questioning.” The reality is that agents are “seizing people using firearms, physical violence, and warehouse detentions,” Sotomayor wrote. That includes U.S. citizens who are “being seized, taken from their jobs, and prevented from working to support themselves and their families,” she continued.
“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.”
– U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor
She concurred that the Fourth Amendment prohibits the government’s actions during the raids, saying Monday’s decision improperly encumbers people living in the U.S.
“[I]t is the Government’s burden to prove that it has reasonable suspicion to stop someone,” she wrote. “The concurrence improperly shifts the burden onto an entire class of citizens to carry enough documentation to prove that they deserve to walk freely. The Constitution does not permit the creation of such a second-class citizenship status.”
Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson joined in Sotomayor’s dissent.