The U.S. Supreme Court delivered a win for the Trump administration in its bid to enforce immigration laws in California on Monday. The ruling is the latest in a string of SCOTUS orders revoking overreaching injunctions issued by rogue lower court judges.
In its 6-3 decision, the high court placed a temporary stay on a lower court injunction that prohibited Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents from carrying out deportation operations in Los Angeles, California. The injunction was issued in July by Biden-appointed District Judge Maame E. Frimpong, who argued that plaintiffs would likely succeed on their claims that the administration’s raids violated the Fourth Amendment.
According to Monday’s Supreme Court order, the temporary stay on Frimpong’s block will remain in effect “pending the disposition of the appeal in the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and disposition of a petition for a writ of certiorari, if such a writ is timely sought.” The stay will terminate if a potential petition from the government to SCOTUS is denied by the high court or if SCOTUS agrees to take up the matter and render a final judgement in the case.
Associate Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson would have denied the administration’s application for relief.
In a concurring opinion, Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh argued that “the Government has made a sufficient showing to obtain a stay pending appeal.” He laid out several reasons, one of which included the argument that “plaintiffs likely lack Article III standing to seek a broad injunction restricting immigration officers from making these investigative stops.”
“Plaintiffs’ standing theory is especially deficient in this case because immigration officers also use their experience to stop suspected illegal immigrants based on a variety of factors. So even if the Government had a policy of making stops based on the factors prohibited by the District Court, immigration officers might not rely only on those factors if and when they stop plaintiffs in the future,” Kavanaugh wrote.
The Trump appointee went on to argue that “even if plaintiffs had standing, the Government has a fair prospect of succeeding on the Fourth Amendment issue.” He further agreed that the Trump administration “also demonstrated that it would likely suffer irreparable harm if the District Court’s injunction is not stayed.”
“Just as this Court a few years ago declined to step outside our constitutionally assigned role to improperly compel greater Executive Branch enforcement of the immigration laws … we now likewise must decline to step outside our constitutionally assigned role to improperly restrict reasonable Executive Branch enforcement of the immigration laws,” Kavanaugh wrote. “Consistency and neutrality are hallmarks of good judging, and in my view, we abide by those enduring judicial values in this case by granting the stay.”
Writing for the dissent, Sotomayor hyperbolically accused the majority of “grave[ly] misus[ing]” the high court’s emergency or “interim” docket to grant requests from the Trump administration. The Obama appointee went a step further, outlandishly claiming that the court agreed that the federal government can unilaterally “seize anyone who looks Latino, speaks Spanish, and appears to work a low wage job.”
“The Fourth Amendment protects every individual’s constitutional right to be ‘free from arbitrary interference by law officers,'” Sotomayor wrote. “After today, that may no longer be true for those who happen to look a certain way, speak a certain way, and appear to work a certain type of legitimate job that pays very little. Because this is unconscionably irreconcilable with our Nation’s constitutional guarantees, I dissent.”
The Monday order represents the latest in a string of embarrassing losses for partisan rogue judges, who have greenlit leftist lawfare seeking to stymie the Trump administration’s agenda via a judicial coup.
A few weeks ago, the high court stayed yet another injunction by a lower court judge attempting to prevent the National Institutes of Health from terminating DEI-related grants totaling almost $800 million. The judge’s refusal to abide by recent SCOTUS precedent on the matter prompted a strongly worded rebuke from Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch, who blasted rogue lower courts for defying the Supreme Court.
“[T]his is now the third time in a matter of weeks this Court has had to intercede in a case ‘squarely controlled’ by one of its precedents,” Gorsuch wrote, joined by Kavanaugh. “All these interventions should have been unnecessary, but together they underscore a basic tenet of our judicial system: Whatever their own views, judges are duty-bound to respect ‘the hierarchy of the federal court system created by the Constitution and Congress.'”