Supreme Court allows immigration agents to resume ‘roving patrols’ in LA, siding with Trump

The U.S. Supreme Court today granted the Trump administration’s emergency request to lift a temporary restraining order barring federal immigration officials from conducting “roving patrols” and profiling people based on their appearance in Los Angeles and Southern California.

The case is likely to have an enormous impact, not just for Los Angeles but across the country, several experts told CalMatters. It means immigration agents can legally resume aggressive street sweeps that began in early June in Los Angeles, the epicenter for President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign. 

The Supreme Court, by a 6-3 majority, agreed with the Trump administration that federal immigration officers can briefly detain and interrogate individuals about whether they are lawfully in the United States and that they can rely on a “totality of circumstances” standard for reasonable suspicion. That means everything the officer knew and observed at the time of the stop. 

The U.S. Supreme Court took the case through its emergency docket, also known as the shadow docket, which is used for cases that are handled speedily with limited briefing and typically no oral argument.

Justices do not have to publish an opinion when they act from the emergency docket. Justice Brett Kavanaugh, nonetheless, wrote a concurring opinion explaining his reasoning in lifting restrictions on Los Angeles immigration sweeps.

“Here, those circumstances include: that there is an extremely high number and percentage of illegal immigrants in the Los Angeles area; that those individuals tend to gather in certain locations to seek daily work; that those individuals often work in certain kinds of jobs, such as day labor, landscaping, agriculture, and construction, that do not require paperwork and are therefore especially attractive to illegal immigrants; and that many of those illegally in the Los Angeles area come from Mexico or Central America and do not speak much English,” he wrote. 

“To be clear,” he continued, “ethnicity alone cannot furnish reasonable suspicion; under this Court’s case law regarding immigration stops, however, it can be a ‘relevant factor’ when considered with other salient factors.”

The three justices appointed by Democratic presidents dissented from the majority, stressing that they objected to the court lifting limitations on immigration sweeps without oral argument and through the emergency docket, which the Trump administration used extensively this year.

The Supreme Court has sided with Trump in at least 17 cases in a row now.

“That decision is yet another grave misuse of our emergency docket,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in the dissent.  “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.” 

Los Angeles and dozens of other Southern California municipalities wrote in an amicus brief supporting the restraining order that, because of the population makeup that “half the population” of the region meets the federal government’s criteria for being stopped and questioned about their immigration status.

Gov. Gavin Newsom in a written statement condemned the decision and said the state would “continue fighting these abhorrent attacks on Californians.”

“Trump’s hand-picked Supreme Court majority just became the Grand Marshal for a parade of racial terror in Los Angeles. This isn’t about enforcing immigration laws — it’s about targeting Latinos and anyone who doesn’t look or sound like Stephen Miller’s idea of an American, including U.S. citizens and children, to deliberately harm California’s families and small businesses,” Newsom said, referring to Trump’s deputy chief of staff.

The ruling means the Border Patrol can resume the aggressive tactics a district federal judge said violated people’s Fourth Amendment constitutional rights against unreasonable search and seizure. It means officers can rely on little more than a person being in the parking lot of a Home Depot and speaking Spanish to question someone about their immigration status. 

In a brief asking justices to remove restrictions on immigration stops, Trump’s Department of Homeland Security wrote that the lower-court injunction interfered with agents’ efforts to remove unauthorized immigrants. 

“The injunction raises the specter of contempt for every stop in the district, threatening agents with sanctions if the court disbelieves that they relied on additional factors in making any particular stop. It chills the exercise of Executive authority and usurps the President’s Article II powers to enforce our immigration laws,” attorneys for the Trump administration wrote. 

Why courts paused ‘roving patrols’

The district court found, based on a “mountain of evidence,” that the government engaged in a pattern of conducting stops without reasonable suspicion—relying solely on traits like race or ethnicity, speaking Spanish or accented English, the location a person is in, and the type of work a person does.

The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals had upheld the lower court’s ruling, chiding the Trump administration for misrepresenting the restraining order in their appeal. 

“If, as the Defendants suggest, they are not conducting stops that lack reasonable suspicion, they can hardly claim to be irreparably harmed by an injunction aimed at preventing … stops not supported by reasonable suspicion,” the three-judge panel from the 9th Circuit wrote.   

A coalition of civil rights, immigrant rights, and local government agencies, including the American Civil Liberties Union and the United Farm Workers, sought the order, arguing the LA-area raids have violated people’s rights by allowing federal immigration agents to stop people who simply appear to be Latino, including U.S. citizens. 

“The federal government is seeking to detain individuals solely because they are not white, speak Spanish or speak accented English. That idea is anathema to everything the United States stands for, and it should be rejected,” a group of cities in Los Angeles County wrote in amicus brief supporting restrictions on immigration agents. They wrote that this summer’s raids had “sown terror” in their communities. 

LA immigration sweeps continued

Despite the previous order barring profiling, agents have continued an aggressive enforcement blitz in the nation’s second-largest city. 

About 40 agents hit a Westlake Home Depot on Aug. 28, using tear gas and pepper pellets to disperse a crowd before detaining eight people, a Border Patrol official confirmed Friday. That’s the same location where agents previously made a hype video set to rap music of themselves hiding in a Penske rental truck before bursting out to detain day laborers in a raid dubbed Operation Trojan Horse.

Under Operation-At-Large Chief Gregory Bovino, the Border Patrol has detained Latino daylaborers, swarming Home Depots and carwashes across the nation’s second largest city. Bovino has vowed to bring similar tactics to cities across the country.

Kevin R. Johnson, the director of Aoki Center on Critical Race and Nation Studies at UC Davis School of Law said the federal government’s racial profiling has consequences beyond immigration enforcement. He wrote to CalMatters and also in a paper for the SMU Law Review that “race-based immigration enforcement undermines Latina/o sense of belonging in the national community for generations.” 

“Importantly, the Trump administration’s campaign against people of color goes well beyond immigration law and immigrants. As exemplified by the administration’s war on diversity, equity, and inclusion, the President has sought to eliminate programs that seek to promote the full integration of racial and other minorities into U.S. society,” Johnson wrote.