This is an adapted excerpt from the Sept. 13 episode of “Velshi.”
Last week, the Supreme Court gave federal agents the green light to geographically, racially and linguistically profile people while carrying out immigration sweeps in Los Angeles, and in doing so, it shattered one of the bedrocks of the American legal tradition.
To truly understand how grave this Supreme Court decision is, we must go back to the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which reads:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Few parts of the Bill of Rights drew more directly from the lived experiences of Americans at the time than this one. American colonists lived under a British crown that tried to police their private lives, communications and gatherings. The Townshend Acts of 1767 authorized “writs of assistance,” warrantless searches that let the king’s men storm homes and shops at will — no reasonable suspicion, no rights, just raw power. The Coercive Acts of 1774 went further, forcing colonists to house British troops in their own homes.
For the earliest Americans, the presence of troops on their streets and in their homes, the intrusive raids, the constant surveillance weren’t abstract grievances. They were daily humiliations, a powder keg that helped to ignite the American Revolution.
It’s why the Constitution’s framers drew a hard line. The Third and Fourth amendments were their answer. A person’s home, property and person are off-limits to arbitrary power because these are sacred spaces. The revolution was, in no small part, about declaring: here, the government stops. It was a declaration that in America, the individual is sovereign; the government cannot treat persons as suspects or enemies without cause.
But last week, the Supreme Court blew a hole straight through that principle. In the case that prompted this decision, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo, the Supreme Court stayed a lower court’s order in California that had blocked the Trump administration from using what amounted to racial profiling to stop and question people it suspected of being undocumented.
In plainer English, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents now have the high court’s blessing to racially profile people during immigration sweeps in Los Angeles. They are allowed to stop people based solely on their apparent race or ethnicity, language or accent, and the type of work they do.
The Fourth Amendment requires reasonable suspicion before any person — citizen or not, documented or not — can be stopped by law enforcement. The law is not allowed just to guess that, because of how you look or speak or where you live and work, you might have committed a crime. Equal protection forbids race to be used as a factor.
The lower courts enforced that principle. The Supreme Court just erased it.
But perhaps the most outrageous part is that the conservative majority on the Supreme Court issued its decision using the so-called shadow docket, where the court rules on the Trump administration’s emergency motions without oral argument or explanation: no hearing, no accountability, just judicial fiat, handed down in the dark.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in her powerful dissent, wrote: “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. Rather than stand idly by while our constitutional freedoms are lost, I dissent.”
This ruling isn’t just about immigration. It tells millions of Americans that your protection from unreasonable search and seizure depends on whether the government decides you “look” like you belong. That is not what the Constitution’s framers envisioned. That is not democracy as we know it.
When Justice Brett Kavanaugh tried to defend it, his words only underscored how hollow his reasoning was. In his concurring opinion (the only one offered), reflecting solely the justice’s own views, Kavanaugh wrote, without a hint of irony: “The interests of individuals who are illegally in the country in avoiding being stopped by law enforcement for questioning is ultimately an interest in evading the law. That is not an especially weighty legal interest.”
Kavanaugh’s framing flips the entire constitutional order on its head. The Fourth Amendment is not about rewarding the innocent and punishing the guilty. It exists precisely to protect people even when the government suspects them of wrongdoing.
Rights are not conditional favors granted after one’s innocence is proven. They are the shield against arbitrary suspicion in the first place. Kavanaugh’s distorted logic seems to suggest that if you’re brown, you’re guilty of an immigration violation until proven innocent. As one of the nation’s top constitutional law experts, Erwin Chemerinsky, put it, the Supreme Court has “abandoned basic constitutional principles.”
The broader implications are darker still. Most of the Bill of Rights is premised on the idea that liberty is more important than granting government limitless discretion in the name of “law enforcement.” By Kavanaugh’s reasoning, any Fourth Amendment protection could be reframed as nothing more than “an interest in evading the law.” That’s not just sloppy logic, it’s dangerous. It’s an attack on the entire American legal tradition. It’s not that the conservative justices don’t understand the Constitution. It’s that they don’t seem to care. As Chemerinsky observed: “This is just the latest in a series of rulings in which the six conservative justices have approved Trump administration actions that violate the Constitution. … If the court does not uphold the Constitution and the rule of law, is there anything to protect our constitutional democracy?” It was a declaration that in America, the individual is sovereign; the government cannot treat persons as suspects or enemies without cause. What this Supreme Court decision does is to normalize the roving patrols of a police state, where constitutional rights shrink or vanish if the government declares you the enemy. Once the Fourth Amendment is treated as negotiable for one group — Latino communities in this case — it becomes weaker for all of us. And if we don’t see the danger in that, if we don’t call it what it is, we are in deeper trouble than we even realize. It all points to something bigger: The Supreme Court’s conservative majority has stopped pretending to be a neutral arbiter of law, and the shadow docket has become its weapon of choice — used to gut precedent, to countenance overreach, to weaken democracy’s foundations, without public deliberation. No transparency, no accountability. More than two centuries ago, Americans declared independence to rid themselves of kings and unchecked power. Today, the Supreme Court appears to be dismantling those safeguards piece by piece, ruling as if its conservative majority serves one man: a president who thinks it’s normal to declare war on America’s cities. This is who they’ve decided to hitch their legacy to, a would-be strongman who spits on the very Constitution they swore to uphold, a man whose contempt for democracy will stain this Supreme Court not just for today, not just for a term, but possibly for generations to come. The Fourth Amendment was the framers’ line in the sand: here, the government stops. The Supreme Court has erased that line.
Ali Velshi is the host of “Velshi,” which airs Saturdays and Sundays on MSNBC. He has been awarded the National Headliner Award for Business & Consumer Reporting for “How the Wheels Came Off,” a special on the near collapse of the American auto industry. His work on disabled workers and Chicago’s red-light camera scandal in 2016 earned him two News and Documentary Emmy Award nominations, adding to a nomination in 2010 for his terrorism coverage.
Amel Ahmed
Amel Ahmed is a Segment Producer for "Velshi."
Allison Detzel is an editor/producer for MS NOW.
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