The Supreme Court’s Republican-appointed majority has granted the Trump administration’s emergency request to lift an order that temporarily restrained the government’s “roving patrols” in Los Angeles. A California judge had ruled that plaintiffs who sued the government, including U.S. citizens, would likely succeed in their claim that officials are conducting such patrols without reasonable suspicion.
The high court’s three Democratic appointees dissented from the unexplained majority order Monday, with Justice Sonia Sotomayor writing for the trio that the Fourth Amendment’s historical protections from arbitrary government interference “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.” She called the majority’s move “unconscionably irreconcilable with our Nation’s constitutional guarantees.”
U.S. District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong’s temporary restraining order on July 11 said the government can’t rely solely on any combination of the following four factors to make stops: apparent race or ethnicity; speaking Spanish or accented English; presence at a particular location, such as a day laborer pickup area; or one’s type of work.
After a federal appeals court panel declined to intervene, the administration turned to the Supreme Court, arguing that the judge’s order “defies blackletter Fourth Amendment law, imposing a straitjacket on law-enforcement efforts that is inimical to the context- and case-specific totality-of-the-circumstances inquiry that this Court’s precedents demand.”
Opposing emergency high court relief, the plaintiffs countered that the judge’s order “broke no new legal ground,” writing that it “does not prevent the government from enforcing the immigration laws, conducting consensual encounters, or relying on any or all of the four factors along with other facts to form reasonable suspicion.” They further wrote that the administration’s “extraordinary claim that it can get very close to justifying a seizure of any Latino person in the Central District [of California] because of the asserted number of Latino people there who are not legally present is anathema to the Constitution.” Subscribe to the Deadline: Legal Newsletter for expert analysis on the top legal stories of the week, including updates from the Supreme Court and developments in the Trump administration’s legal cases.
Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro," a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined MS NOW, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.
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