Supreme Court ruling allows racial profiling, enables federal agents, diminishes constitutional freedoms

Constitutional rights suffered a major blow this week when the U.S. Supreme Court essentially legalized racial profiling by government agents in the Los Angeles area – and potentially elsewhere – until further notice.

By lifting a federal judge’s order prohibiting government agents from making immigration-related stops in the Los Angeles area based on “reasonable suspicion” as arbitrary as skin color, language spoken, job type, or even speaking English with an accent. Much like the masked agents now authorized to pull aside, question, and seize almost anyone without justifiable cause, the court’s brief ruling was unsigned and gave no reasons.

Although the Sept. 8 ruling is certainly not the final word on this issue, it’s a significant setback to Fourth Amendment constitutional rights protecting people against unreasonable search and seizure and is sure to embolden the Trump Administration’s already overzealous efforts to forcibly detain and deport immigrants regardless of their status or criminal records.

“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,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her dissent of the ruling, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

Because the ruling is specific to the federal judge’s order in Southern California, it’s unclear whether it applies nationwide. But here in Colorado we have already seen similar instances of racial profiling and detainments of legal permanent residents through fabricated traffic stops by unidentified agents posing as local police and taking innocent people into custody. Nationally, it has become commonplace to see videos of ICE agents aggressively arresting immigrants and holding them until they provide proof of their legal status to the agents’ satisfaction.

The Fourth Amendment makes clear that these unreasonable searches, seizures and excessive uses of force are a breach of constitutional protections, and by allowing them to continue even in an isolated region near the southern border, the Supreme Court’s ruling is extremely dangerous. As Justice Sotomayor wrote in her dissent, granting this administration a green-light on racial profiling has “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.”

This decision is not just an attack on Latinos and other people of color, but an attack on everyone in America and the U.S. Constitution that was designed to protect us. We must stand together in the fight to protect and defend our rights as the case moves to a federal appeals court in the coming months. Should it reach the U.S. Supreme Court again, we hope the justices are able to recognize their mistake and reach a decision that restores, rather than diminishes, our constitutional freedoms.