On Monday, the Supreme Court lifted a district-court injunction that blocked federal agents from making immigration stops based on certain demographic characteristics. District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong had ruled that location, occupation, language, and ethnicity – taken individually or in combination — are not sufficient to establish reasonable suspicion that someone is an illegal alien. But as Justice Kavanaugh explained in staying Judge Frimpong’s order, circumstances on the ground make reliance on such factors entirely reasonable:

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.

Having recently published a report on the illegal immigrant share of workers in each Census-identified occupation, I can bolster Kavanaugh’s point with some numbers. Let’s take the example of landscaping mentioned above. As of the 2019-2023 period that the data set covers, about 17 percent of all “landscaping and groundskeeping workers” in the U.S. were illegal immigrants. Put another way, a randomly-selected landscaping worker has a 17 percent chance of being illegal. That’s already a fairly high percentage without adding any additional information.

But of course, we can add more. This case focused on enforcement operations in Los Angeles. A landscaping worker in the Los Angeles metropolitan area has a 30 percent chance of being illegal. Furthermore, a Hispanic landscaping worker in Los Angeles has a 33 percent chance. Finally, a Hispanic landscaping worker in Los Angeles who speaks English less than very well has a remarkable 42 percent chance of being illegal.

This exercise can be repeated for other immigrant-heavy occupations. For example, about 21 percent of all construction laborers in the U.S. were illegal in the 2019–2023 period. Adding the factors of Los Angeles, Hispanic ethnicity, and low English ability increases that percentage all the way to 52 percent.

I will leave it to the lawyers to say exactly what “reasonable suspicion” means in a legal sense these days. However, if a law enforcement officer encounters a suspect who has about a 50–50 chance of having committed the violation that the officer is investigating, then common sense suggests that a stop is justified.