Hi everyone,
The Supreme Court issued an emergency stay yesterday declaring that the Trump administration's immigration enforcement actions in Los Angeles can continue. US Attorney for LA Bill Essayli said that his team argued "that the order" against the action from the lower court "was overly broad," and aimed "to hinder [their] ability to apprehend and remove illegal immigrants in Los Angeles."
"We are a nation of laws," Essayli said. "Federal law enforcement is non-negotiable and cannot be curtailed by any court. If plaintiffs disagree with immigration laws, they should address Congress, not a single judge." The Court granted a stay of the lower court's ruling, which had banned the federal government from carrying out immigration enforcement in LA. The timing couldn't be better, since DHS launched Operation Midway Blitz in Chicago this week.
The lower court had said that immigration agents could not randomly stop people on the streets based on their race, ethnicity, or the language they speak. Critics called the tactics "blatant racial profiling." But in concurring with the stay, Justice Kavanaugh cited the Immigration and Nationality Act, which allows immigration officers to "interrogate any alien or person believed to be an alien as to his right to be or to remain in the United States." It goes on to say that agents "may briefly detain" a person if they have "a reasonable suspicion based on specific articulable facts, that the person being questioned... is an alien illegally in the United States."
"The Government," Kavanaugh writes, "estimates that at least 15 million people are in the United States illegally. Many millions illegally entered (or illegally overstayed) just in the last few years. Illegal immigration is especially pronounced in the Los Angeles area, among other locales in the United States. About 10 percent of the people in the Los Angeles region are illegally in the United States—meaning about 2 million illegal immigrants out of a total population of 20 million." That's a lot. His full concurrence lays it all out.
But three liberal justices, Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson all disagreed, saying that the government was unfairly targeting people in LA and that agents were violating the 4th Amendment in conducting raids and detaining people without asking those people any questions first. The 4th Amendment is the one that protects against illegal searches and seizures, and Kavanaugh argued that ICE doesn't conduct these raids without probable cause.
The justices' dissent was in agreement with the lower court, saying that "the Government was stopping individuals based solely on four factors: (1) their apparent race or ethnicity; (2) whether they spoke Spanish of English with an accent; (3) the type of location at which they were found (such as a car wash or bus stop); and (4) the type of job they appeared to work." They argued that these factors "could not satisfy the Fourth Amendment's requirement of reasonable suspicion..."
One could say that the issue is that people who are not guilty of being illegally in the US could get wrapped up in these enforcement actions, and we of course have the old saw about it being better for 100 guilty men to go free than to imprison one innocent man, but does it stand that an innocent man cannot be questioned? I don't think it does. Police in my county routinely have drunk driving stops, and despite my personally no swerving, not drinking, not giving any indication that I'm driving while intoxicated, I too am stopped.