Supreme Court ruling subjects California to what border communities have endured for generations

Christian Ramirez was on his way to school 35 years ago when a Border Patrol agent approached him at gunpoint. Then just 15 years old, the San Diegan was apparently handcuffed on the streets of the Nestor border community, wrongly and racially profiled. 

Ramirez recalled the incident in a Facebook post recently after the Supreme Court broke with lower courts in a major immigration enforcement ruling stemming from this summer’s raids in Los Angeles. In a 6-3 decision, the highest court of the land gave federal immigration agents the green light to resume roving patrols as a means to indiscriminately stop and question people about their immigration status — based on how they look, the language they speak, the type of work they do or simply where they might be standing.

For Ramirez, now the political director for SEIU United Service Workers West, this is not new. He told me that the Border Patrol, the federal agency with a 101-year history of border enforcement, has always operated with impunity. Racial profiling “has always been the norm in the borderlands.”

Now the rest of California is getting the same treatment.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s concurring opinion rationalized profiling to an eye-opening level, writing that “those individuals often work in certain kinds of jobs, such as day labor, landscaping, agriculture, and construction” and many “do not speak much English.”

Since a Kern County raid in January, videos of masked federal agents chasing predominantly Latino workers at Home Depots, car washes or parks — without regard for legal status or criminal history — have filled social media feeds across California. But for Justice Kavanaugh, “If the officers learn that the individual they stopped is a U.S. citizen or otherwise lawfully in the United States, they promptly let the individual go.”

Kavanaugh’s wishful thinking or privileged ignorance would have you believe the encounters are mere inconveniences. On the contrary, they have been quite catastrophic.

Silverio Villegas-Gonzalez, a 38-year-old father of two, represents the latest casualty. Earlier this month in Chicago, an ICE agent shot and killed Villegas-Gonzalez during a traffic stop. In Ventura County in July, Jaime Alanís died from injuries he sustained in an attempt to flee agents raiding a legal pot farm.

What Ramirez experienced as a child — and countless others in southern San Diego County — is certainly not unique. The difference now is that it’s occurring far from the border.

Together with the American Friends Service Committee and Union del Barrio, I helped document roving patrols in San Diego for nearly a decade in the 2000s. Border Patrol agents surveilled buses and the San Diego trolley, harassing thousands of people based on appearance or if they spoke Spanish, and targeted working-class neighborhoods during busy commute times. We discovered that anyone could be a target, even if they’re seeking shelter during a natural disaster or taking transit to get to school.

In 2003, Border Patrol Sector Chief William Veal issued a memo ending roving patrols but was quickly overruled by Robert Bonner, then the Customs and Border Protection commissioner, who called it “overly broad and restrictive.”

When President Obama refreshed the federal policy restricting federal agencies from using racial profiling in 2014, his administration excluded CBP agents who could “consider race and ethnicity when stopping people at airports, border crossings and immigration checkpoints.”

At the height of California’s anti-immigrant movement in 1994, Border Patrol agents on bikes stopped me in Downtown San Diego and questioned me about my status. They insisted in broken Spanish that I had to show them my “papers.”

About 20 years ago, a plainclothes immigration agent detained my father outside a grocery store a block from his home in South San Diego. The agent similarly asked him if he had papers. 

My father always carried an old government ID issued to U.S. citizens to facilitate border crossings. The immigration agent didn’t know what to make of the antiquated document.

Racial profiling and its impact on my family goes back to the 1930s, when immigration agents violently rounded up and forcibly deported hundreds of thousands of people in violation of the U.S. Constitution, including U.S. citizens. Immigration agents sent my paternal grandparents to Mexico, even though they were born in Los Angeles.

Donald Trump’s radical vision for mass deportations has glamorized the cruelty of this historic period. He wants to surpass those numbers.

Norma Chavez-Peterson, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of San Diego and Imperial Counties, was a co-counsel on a lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security after the L.A. raids unfolded in June. In an email, she told me the Supreme Court’s decision “emboldens the Trump administration and enables their broader power grab to weaken the constitutional protections of all people. 

“Right now, the decision directly impacts immigrants and people of color in Los Angeles and surrounding regions — and it won’t stop there,” she continued. “When one person’s rights are stripped away, the thread that binds all our freedoms begins to fray.”

With the Supreme Court sanctioning racial profiling in how immigration agents can indiscriminately question people, the newly supercharged Homeland Security budget could lead to thousands more agents being unleashed on American streets, and disastrous for our understanding of how constitutional protections should apply.

In San Diego, elected officials held a press conference announcing a county-wide initiative to promote due process and public safety across San Diego County. 

“The Due Process and Dignity Ordinance,” said San Diego City Councilmember Sean Elo-Rivera, “responds by drawing clear, lawful boundaries around what can and cannot happen on city-controlled and funded property. It demands that everyone in San Diego — including those who were made less safe by the SCOTUS decision — is afforded due process and, in doing so, also provides all people the firmest ground possible to assert their constitutional rights.”

Ramirez, the SEIU official, believes “it’s going to take creating a movement beyond the halls of justice and legislative bodies to overturn racism codified by the Supreme Court.”  

He reminded me of a slogan borrowed from Puerto Rican students resisting U.S. troops in Vieques. It’s now used by community members in San Diego to demonstrate power: “La migra no se fue, el pueblo la sacó, and it will take all of us.”