From ScotusBlog: Supreme Court allows federal officers to more freely make immigration stops in LA

A case involving the due process guarantees in the 4th Amendment - sort of.

- Click here for the article.  

- Click here for Noem v. Perdomo.

From the article: 


The Supreme Court on Monday paused a ruling by a federal judge in Los Angeles that imposed restrictions on the ability of federal agents to make immigration stops that the plaintiffs say are based on racial profiling. The order by U.S. District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong barred agents in the Central District of California – an area with a population of approximately 20 million people – from making such stops without reasonable suspicion that the person being stopped is in the United States illegally. Reasonable suspicion, Frimpong added, cannot rest solely on any combination of four factors: “apparent race or ethnicity,” speaking in Spanish or accented English, being present at a location where undocumented immigrants “are known to gather” (such as pick-up spots for day laborers), and working at specific jobs, such as landscaping or construction.

Monday’s order by the Supreme Court puts Frimpong’s ruling on hold while the Trump administration’s appeals continue. In an opinion agreeing with the decision to grant the government’s request for a stay, Justice Brett Kavanaugh emphasized what he characterized as the narrow role of judges in immigration cases. Judges, he wrote, “may have views on which policy approach is better or fairer. But judges are not appointed to make those policy calls. We merely ensure,” he stressed, “that the Executive Branch acts within the confines of the Constitution and federal statutes.”

Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented from Monday’s ruling, in a 21-page opinion joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. Sotomayor described the court’s action as “yet another grave misuse of our emergency docket. We should not have to live in a country,” she wrote, “where the Government can seize anyone who looks Latino, speaks Spanish, and appears to work a low wage job. Rather than stand idly by while our constitutional freedoms are lost,” she concluded, “I dissent.”

The case stems from federal immigration raids that began in the Los Angeles area in June as part of what some government officials have called the “largest Mass Deportation Operation” in U.S. history. Describing the government’s actions as creating “an illegal detention and deportation dragnet,” a group that includes both U.S. citizens and undocumented immigrants who had been targeted by the raids went to federal court the following month. They contended, among other things, that the raids violated the Fourth Amendment’s ban on “unreasonable searches and seizures,” which the Supreme Court has held generally prohibits immigration officials from stopping someone in public unless they have reasonable suspicion that the person being stopped has violated federal law or immigration law. That reasonable suspicion, the challengers contended in their complaint, must be based on “specific articulable facts,” rather than “broad profiles which cast suspicion on entire categories of people.”