CHICAGO (WLS) — The Supreme Court on Monday allowed federal agents to proceed with extensive immigration operations in Los Angeles, marking a recent success for President Donald Trump’s administration at the high court.
The justices lifted an injunction from a judge who had ruled that “roving patrols” were making arbitrary arrests in LA. The decision prevented agents from stopping individuals solely due to their race, language, occupation, or location.
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It’s unclear if the ruling applies beyond Los Angeles.
However, legal experts and advocates express to the I-Team their concern that these tactics may be replicated in Chicago, especially with the looming threat of a large-scale invasion by immigration agents, now dubbed “Midway Blitz” by the Department of Homeland Security.
On Sunday, footage shared with ABC7 reveals Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents — wearing identifiable ICE badges — detaining a man known locally as a flower vendor on Chicago’s Southwest Side.
Advocates worry this might be the initiation of operation “Midway Blitz,” a smaller-scale version of the mass migrant arrests in Los Angeles from June, akin to the raids and apprehensions that immigration advocates sought to prevent through a class action lawsuit.
U.S. District Judge Maame E. Frimpong in Los Angeles had uncovered substantial evidence that enforcement practices were breaching the Constitution. The plaintiffs included U.S. citizens caught up in immigration detentions.
Trump’s Republican administration argued the order wrongly restricted agents carrying out its widespread crackdown on illegal immigration.
An appeals court had left Frimpong’s ruling in place.
But in an emergency 31-page ruling published Monday, the Supreme Court’s six conservative justices lifted restrictions against aggressive immigration enforcement tactics by federal agents.
“Can ICE agents detain someone on the basis of some combination of their ethnicity or race, their speaking Spanish or English with an accent, their location at a particular kind of location, and they’re working a particular kind of job? The answer to that now is yes,” said ABC 7 Chief Legal Analyst Gil Soffer.
Speaking at the site of that mass Home Depot raid, a fuming Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass fired back.
“I want the entire nation to hear me when I say, this isn’t just an attack on the people of Los Angeles,” Bass said. “This is an attack on every person in this city and in every city in our country.”
Here in Chicago, speaking at a Monday news conference, Any Huamani with the Brighton Park Neighborhood Council and the Southwest Side Rapid Response team said the threat of ICE operations is already having a visible impact on many communities.
“No vendors are outside,” Huamani said. “People are afraid, people are scared.”
In the ruling, Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote that for individuals stopped and detained who are legally in the country, “the questioning in those circumstances is typically brief, and those individuals may promptly go free after making clear to the immigration officers that they are U. S. citizens.”
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But immigration advocates and legal experts have argued that hasn’t been the case, with reported cases of U.S. citizens detained by ICE for hours, and in some cases days, as they tried to prove they were in the country legally.
“We’ve heard multiple reports of U.S. citizens being held for days, even up to a month, before ice acknowledged their citizenship and released them,” said Nicole Hallett, a professor of Law and director of the Immigrants’ Rights Clinic at the University of Chicago.
“I think this opinion will be read by ICE as giving them carte blanche because they believe that they have the Supreme Court support in these enforcement tactics that they’re undertaking,” Hallett said.
DHS officials called the ruling a “major victory,” arguing “there are no ‘indiscriminate stops’ being made.”
“The Supreme Court simply applied longstanding precedent regarding what qualifies as ‘reasonable suspicion’ under the Fourth Amendment,” a DHS statement reads. “What makes someone a target of ICE is if they are illegally in the U.S.”
In a stinging dissent joined by her two liberal colleagues, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said the decision erodes constitutional freedoms.
“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 wrote. “Today, the Court needlessly subjects countless more to these exact same indignities.”
The lawsuit at the center of this ruling will now continue to unfold in California, with a hearing set for Sept. 24.
Since the Supreme Court did not explain its reasoning for the emergency ruling, legal experts tell the I-Team it’s unclear if it directly applies to immigration enforcement in Chicago.
But those same experts said that if similar lawsuits are filed based on immigration enforcement in the city, the high court may rule the same way as they did in Los Angeles.
“This is a ruling by the Supreme Court, and any other case that would be filed, for instance, in Chicago or in any other place would likely also end up at the Supreme Court,” Hallett told the I-Team. “I think it’s a pretty basic principle that we don’t racially profile in this country. And it appears that the Supreme Court has condoned racial profiling in Los Angeles.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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