(The Center Square) – California Attorney General Rob Bonta expressed disappointment Monday with a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that temporarily overturns a lower court’s order prohibiting U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers from using race, workplace and native language to partly justify raids.
The court ruled Monday 6-3 to grant the Trump administration’s emergency application for a stay on U.S. District Court Judge Maame Frimpong’s order restricting factors that ICE officers can use for reasonable suspicion.
Frimpong wrote that all individuals, regardless of immigration status, share the Fourth Amendment’s protection against illegal search and seizure and the Fifth Amendment’s protection against self-incrimination.
The Supreme Court decision on the stay came in a court document entitled “Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, et al., vs. Pedro Vasquez Perdomo, et al.”
The court granted the stay after the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, based in San Francisco, denied the Trump administration’s effort to temporarily pause Frimpong’s order.
Bonta told reporters he agreed with Frimpong.
“I thought it was written well and was well supported by the law and the facts,” he said at a Los Angeles news conference.
Rulings on an emergency docket don’t allow full insight into the conservative U.S. Supreme Court majority’s thoughts on the case, Bonta said. But he added that U.S. Justice Brett Kavanaugh provided his concurring opinion, which Bonta called “very disturbing.”
Kavanaugh said race, along with other factors, could provide a reasonable suspicion because the bar is lower for that than for probable cause. Kavanaugh said no immigration stop can be based on race alone, but added a high number of illegal immigrants live in Los Angeles.
“The Government sometimes makes brief investigative stops to check the immigration status of those who gather in locations where people are hired for day jobs; who work or appear to work in jobs such as construction, landscaping, agriculture, or car washes that often do not require paperwork and are therefore attractive to illegal immigrants; and who do not speak much if any English,” Kavanaugh wrote.
“If the officers learn that the individual they stopped is a U. S. citizen or otherwise lawfully in the United States, they promptly let the individual go,” he continued. “If the individual is illegally in the United States, the officers may arrest the individual and initiate the process for removal.”
Bonta cited liberal U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent in which she said, “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.”
Bonta said he couldn’t agree more.
Sotomayor called Monday’s Supreme Court decision a “grave misuse of our emergency docket.”
And California Gov. Gavin Newsom blasted the ruling in a statement.
“Trump’s hand-picked Supreme Court majority just became the Grand Marshal for a parade of racial terror in Los Angeles. This isn’t about enforcing immigration laws — it’s about targeting Latinos and anyone who doesn’t look or sound like (White House Deputy Chief of Staff) Stephen Miller’s idea of an American, including U.S. citizens and children, to deliberately harm California’s families and small businesses,” Newsom said. “Trump’s private police force now has a green light to come after your family — and every person is now a target — but we will continue fighting these abhorrent attacks on Californians.”
But Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin called the Supreme Court ruling a win for “the safety of Californians and the rule of the law.
“DHS law enforcement will not be slowed down and will continue to arrest and remove the murderers, rapists, gang members, and other criminal illegal aliens that (Los Angeles Mayor) Karen Bass continues to give safe harbor,” McLaughlin said in a statement Monday.
