According to the NY Times:
The Supreme Court on Monday lifted a federal judge’s order prohibiting government agents from making indiscriminate immigration-related stops in the Los Angeles area ... The court’s brief order was unsigned and gave no reasons. ...
The court’s three liberal members dissented.
“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, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.
“Rather than stand idly by while our constitutional freedoms are lost,” Justice Sotomayor added, “I dissent.”
... Civil rights groups and several individuals filed suit, accusing the administration of unconstitutional sweeps in which thousands of people had been arrested. They described the encounters in the suit as “indiscriminate immigration operations” that had swept up thousands of day laborers, carwash workers, farmworkers, caregivers and others.
“Individuals with brown skin are approached or pulled aside by unidentified federal agents, suddenly and with a show of force,” the complaint said, “and made to answer questions about who they are and where they are from,” violating the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition of unreasonable searches and seizures.
There will be further litigation, but it seems abundantly clear that this Supreme Court recognizes no constitutional rights for Brown people and people who don't speak English.
This country has been here before. In 1857, a Supreme Court captured by slave-holding interests, declared that African-descended persons did not enjoy the protection of the law.
Chief Justice Roger Taney: such persons "had no rights which the white man was bound to respect..."
That time around, the breach of the national legal system led to violence within the states and, soon, the bloody Civil War been the free Union and the enslaving South. The modern court has adopted the same standard. We can only hope we can come out of this without so much violence. If this is really the meaning of the US Constitution, we, the people of these United States, probably cannot come out with that document intact.
Kavanaugh’s description [of ICE raids] reads as though it were downloaded from the Department of Homeland Security’s website. Almost every word of this is preposterous. “Brief investigative stops” at places where undocumented immigrants are likely to work? What we have seen repeatedly are not “stops.” They are grabs and kidnapping. Most often, no questions are asked. Even when colleagues have insisted that the person targeted by ICE agents are here legally, or that they are citizens, ICE agents proceed to tackle, beat, cuff, and spirit away individuals they have targeted. And we have seen migrants detained and forcibly taken into custody as often in courthouses after immigration hearings, or in neighborhoods cutting lawns as at Home Depot.
That Kavanaugh could so haplessly could make this statement just days after South Korean nationals authorized to work as engineers at a Georgia EV battery plant were arrested, shackled and taken into custody by ICE after an immigration raid in what has become an international incident, demonstrates how utterly out of touch he is.
Kavanaugh assures us that it is no problem to be apprehended, taken to a facility – perhaps several states away – until you can prove that you are a legal resident or citizen. This is his idea of democracy – a country in which citizens and legal residents who are Black, Latino or Asian, and who happen to work in “locations where people are hired for day jobs” must carry proof of citizenship (their “freedom papers,” if you will) or risk apprehension by masked thugs who will hold them perhaps for months.
The fantasy world Kavanaugh describes is the kind of world in which clueless white men (or deliberately obtuse white men) in positions of power were permitted to languish before the Civil Rights Movement brought the reality of life for marginalized people into American living rooms in technicolor. ...
When a Court legalizes thuggish racist violence, normalizes this, the national rule of law is truly in the toilet. Will the rest of us just carry on silently?
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