The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) has granted a request from President Donald Trump’s administration to override a lower court’s ruling that barred Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents from carrying out federal immigration enforcement operations under the claim that such raids constitute racial profiling.
In July, Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong, appointed to the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California by former President Joe Biden, halted ICE agents from conducting raids in the sanctuary jurisdiction of the Los Angeles, California, metro area.
Before the Trump administration asked SCOTUS to allow ICE agents to continue arresting illegal aliens in Los Angeles while the case makes its way through the courts, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld Frimpong’s order.
On Monday, in a 6-3 decision, Justice Kavanaugh writes for the conservative majority that “the government has made a sufficient showing to obtain a stay pending appeal.”
In particular, Kavanaugh writes that “immigration stops based on reasonable suspicion of illegal presence have been an important component of U. S. immigration enforcement for decades, across several presidential administrations,” and given the recent influx of illegal aliens under Biden, it is reasonable that ICE agents have focused their efforts on Los Angeles.
“The interests of individuals who are illegally in the country in avoiding being stopped by law enforcement for questioning is ultimately an interest in evading the law,” Kavanaugh writes. “That is not an especially weighty legal interest.”
Meanwhile, Justice Sotomayor, in writing a dissenting opinion that Justices Kagan and Jackson joined, called the court’s stay on the lower court’s decision “yet another grave misuse of our emergency docket.”
“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,” Sotomayor writes. “Rather than stand idly by while our constitutional freedoms are lost, I dissent.”
The case is Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo, No. 25A169 in the Supreme Court of the United States.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter here.
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