The Supreme Court ruled on Monday that the Trump administration can arrest anyone it suspects of being in the United States illegally, lifting a U.S. District Court judge’s order barring immigration agents from conducting “roving patrols.”
In a 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court said that immigration officers have the right to detain people for questioning if they are suspected of being an illegal immigrant, The Los Angeles Times reported. Justice Brett Kavanaugh, a Trump appointee, wrote a 10-page opinion explaining the high court’s decision, saying that immigration officers have a reasonable and legal basis to detain suspected illegal immigrants in Los Angeles based on the “totality of the circumstances.”
“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,” Kavanaugh added.
The Department of Homeland Security said last week that over 5,000 immigration arrests have been made in the “Los Angeles region” since June 6, the Associated Press reported. Gregory Bovino, the chief Border Patrol agent in charge of the L.A. operation, said that the Trump administration has been successful “in getting the worst of the worst out” of the area. Much of the immigration crackdown in the L.A. area has focused on arresting suspected illegal immigrants in Home Depot parking lots, at car washes, and at farms. Immigration agents have also nabbed people while they were on the street and in their vehicles.
On July 11, U.S. District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong issued a temporary restraining order that stopped Trump’s immigration agents from detaining suspected illegal immigrants over their race, ethnicity, language, location, or employment, the Times reported. Two weeks later, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with the district judge’s ruling.
In an appeal to the Supreme Court, Trump Solicitor Gen. D. John Sauer argued, “Reasonable suspicion is a low bar — well below probable cause.” Sauer said that immigration agents can look at “the totality of circumstances” to detain someone suspected of entering the country illegally, adding that “illegal presence is widespread in the Central District [of California], where 1 in every 10 people is an illegal alien.”
Liberal Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented from the majority ruling, arguing that Kavanaugh’s conclusions are incorrect.
“Immigration agents are not conducting ‘brief stops for questioning,’ as the concurrence would like to believe. They are seizing people using firearms, physical violence, and warehouse detentions,” she wrote. “Nor are undocumented immigrants the only ones harmed by the Government’s conduct. United States citizens are also being seized, taken from their jobs, and prevented from working to support themselves and their families.”