Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor condemned her conservative colleagues for allowing the Donald Trump administration to continue making immigration stops based on racial profiling.
In a brief, unsigned order issued Monday, the high court lifted a federal judge's order that had prohibited federal agents from making indiscriminate immigration stops in the Los Angeles area. Sotomayor turned in a searing dissent that laid out the plainly racist intentions of Trump's immigration enforcement.
"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," she wrote. "Rather than stand idly by while our constitutional freedoms are lost, I dissent."
Sotomayor took issue with Justice Brett Kavanaugh's reasoning, made in his brief concurrence, and said his arguments ignored reality.
"It is the people of Los Angeles and the Central District who will suffer from this Court’s grant of relief to the Government," she wrote. "Immigration agents are not conducting 'brief stops for questioning,' as the concurrence would like to believe. They are seizing people using firearms, physical violence, and warehouse detentions."
"Nor are undocumented immigrants the only ones harmed by the Government’s conduct," Sotomayor added. "United States citizens are also being seized, taken from their jobs, and prevented from working to support themselves and their families. The concurrence relegates the interests of U. S. citizens and individuals with legal status to a single sentence, positing that the Government will free these individuals as soon as they show they are legally in the United States. That blinks reality. Two plaintiffs in this very case tried to explain that they are U. S. citizens; one was then pushed against a fence with his arms twisted behind his back, and the other was taken away from his job to a warehouse for further questioning."
The justice noted that Kavanaugh's reasoning seemed to shift the administrative burden from the government to individuals.
"It 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. The equities therefore lie with the plaintiffs. 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. Today, the Court needlessly subjects countless more to these exact same indignities."
Sotomayor then assailed the right-wing majority's growing reliance on emergency applications to rule in Trump's favor.
"The Court’s order is troubling for another reason: It is entirely unexplained," she wrote. "In the last eight months, this Court’s appetite to circumvent the ordinary appellate process and weigh in on important issues has grown exponentially ... There may be good justification for issuing an unreasoned order in some circumstances. Yet, some situations simply cry out for an explanation, such as when the Government’s conduct flagrantly violates the law, or when lower courts and litigants need guidance about the issues on which they should focus."
The ruling violated a fundamental right laid out in the Bill of Rights, the justice argued.
"The Fourth Amendment protects every individual’s constitutional right to be 'free from arbitrary interference by law officers,'" Sotomayor wrote. "After today, that may no longer be true for those who happen to look a certain way, speak a certain way, and appear to work a certain type of legitimate job that pays very little. Because this is unconscionably irreconcilable with our Nation’s constitutional guarantees, I dissent."
