The Supreme Court on Monday removed a judge’s restrictions on immigration stops in the Los Angeles area that were based on someone speaking Spanish or having a specific job.
The Trump administration appealed to the high court for an urgent intervention, arguing that the restriction was hindering enforcement efforts in a key region for the president’s immigration policies.
The decision seemed to reflect the court’s 6-3 ideological divide, though justices do not have to publicly disclose their decisions in emergency situations. The order, which was just one paragraph, offered no rationale, as is often the case.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh, Trump’s second appointee, wrote a separate opinion stating that the plaintiffs probably lack the legal grounds to sue, and the administration is likely to win in overturning the lawsuit anyway.
“Otherwise, this Court might need to overrule or substantially limit two separate lines of precedent,” Kavanaugh explained in his 10-page supporting opinion.
In her dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor criticized her colleagues’ decision, saying it is “gravely incompatible with our Nation’s constitutional promises.” She was joined by the other two justices appointed by Democratic presidents, Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.
“That decision is yet another grave misuse of our emergency docket,” Sotomayor wrote. “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.”
It marks the administration’s latest victory at the Supreme Court, which has regularly intervened on its emergency docket so Trump can resume parts of his sweeping agenda halted by lower judges.
U.S. District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong imposed the limits in July after a group of individuals stopped by ICE and private organizations sued over what they decried as unconstitutional “roving patrols” in the Los Angeles area.
Frimpong, an appointee of former President Biden, agreed they had shown the administration was likely violating the Fourth Amendment by stopping people without reasonable suspicion.
Her order prevented immigration authorities from relying on four factors to conduct immigration stops and arrests: someone’s race, use of Spanish, type of work or physical presence at a location where migrants in the country unlawfully are known to gather.
The ruling applied to the Central District of California, where more than 20 million people live. It includes Los Angeles as well as surrounding cities such as Riverside, San Bernardino and San Luis Obispo.
“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,” Solicitor General D. John Sauer wrote in the government’s Supreme Court papers.
Sauer warned that the lower ruling was hamstringing enforcement efforts by raising the possibility of contempt when agents conduct immigration raids in the district.
The plaintiffs, represented by the American Civil Liberties Union and other groups, warned the justices that intervening could “ensnare in an immigration dragnet” the millions of U.S. citizens in the district.
“The district court broke no new legal ground,” they wrote in court filings.
Los Angeles and other local jurisdictions backed the plaintiffs, invoking in their Supreme Court papers former President Reagan’s famous “shining city upon a hill” speech.
“Those are the principles on which this nation was founded, and on which it has flourished,” the cities 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.’”
