I'm now the financier of my own oppression and potential demise.
...Supreme Court maga says working day labor or difficulty speaking English is 'common sense' criteria for illegality.
The Supreme Court has lifted restrictions that barred the Trump administration from carrying out immigration-related raids in the Los Angeles area based on broad criteria such as speaking Spanish or gathering at locations day laborers often congregate.
In July, U.S. District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong ruled that ICE agents were conducting “roving patrols” of L.A. and making arrests without “reasonable suspicion” that their targets were in the country illegally. Instead, she found, they appeared to be relying on legally dubious factors such as race, accent and line of work that “seem no more indicative of illegal presence in the country than of legal presence.”
The justices, who apparently divided 6-3 along ideological lines, put on hold a federal district judge’s order that reined in what critics called “roving” raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. That judge had found the tactics were likely unconstitutional because agents were detaining people without probable cause at car washes, bus stops and Home Depot parking lots based on stereotypes.
The high court’s majority offered no explanation for its decision to grant the Trump administration’s emergency appeal to block the district judge’s order. However, Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote separately in support of the decision, saying it was reasonable to briefly question people who meet multiple “common sense” criteria for possible illegal presence — including employment in day labor or construction, and limited English proficiency.
“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,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. “Rather than stand idly by while our constitutional freedoms are lost, I dissent.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/09/08/supreme-court-ice-raids-ruling-00550551
...I find that old white, republican men in positions of power in our government meet multiple “common sense” criteria for probable abuses of rights of Americans.
When do I get to use the militarized and legal resources we all pay for to remove these people; these threats to inhabitants of this nation who fear their own countryfolk to the degree that they're allowing our military to be deployed against us; against our will?
When do I get protection against my fears of this abusive government which allows the military and police forces we all pay for to be exercised against me because of the color of my skin or the way I speak?
Where do I go to get protection for my right to seek day labor without the police harassing and possibly arresting me, now that the highest court in the land has allowed these government abuses directed against me?
Seeking day labor in a faltering economy should be a protected right, an expected right, not a sanctioned source of suspicion and pretext for police action against me.
The Court has just deemed the color of my skin, or the shape of my eyes, or the color of my hair, or any other feature that's not white Anglo Saxon as suspect (as those are supposed represent a true American).
All of this suspicion and evisceration of rights is well apart from my white neighbors and counterparts in my community and elsewhere who will enjoy relative impunity and a presumption of innocence which I now only possess if I speak perfect English, and even then, only at the discretion of local, federal and other police forces in the nation who are now emboldened to detain me out of a crowd while ignoring others who don't share my physical features.
The color of my skin or the way I speak isn't a threat to anyone. My blackness or the way I speak is not a weapon.
Yet, this president and his republican enablers on the Supreme Court have just rendered me less of a citizen, and subject to the worst of abuses we have seen directed by federal law enforcement officials against black and brown people suspected of lacking the necessary documentation to live in America.
I was born in Brooklyn, New York. My mother was the direct descendant of an ex-slave who married her master. My father was born on a reservation in Black Mountain, North Carolina.
boarded a ship with a one-way ticket to America, escaping three years of compulsory German military service. He had been a sickly child, unsuited to hard labor, and feared the effects of the draft. It might have been illegal, but America didn’t care about this law-breaking—at that time, Germans were seen as highly desirable migrants—and Trump was welcomed with open arms. Less than two weeks later, he arrived in New York, where he would eventually establish his family and start a real estate business.
https://www.history.com/articles/donald-trump-father-mother-ancestry
The maga majority on the Supreme Court is vigorously defending the rights of a man whose own family benefited from the open arms of America as he closes the door to mostly dark skinned people who aren't the once coveted Europeans; who now make up much of the white population of the nation who are clamoring for protection against people who don't look like them or talk like them... now emboldened by the highest court in the land, after centuries of assimilation into this thing they call 'American;' into this narrow, declining sliver of humanity that considers their whiteness and the diction the true color and voice of Americans; to brutally and expeditiously push everyone else out of their privileged way.
I'm now the financier of my own oppression and potential demise.
= new reply since forum marked as read
...buffoon frightened out of his gourd of people in this country.
Guilty conscience; and yes, we're coming for him.
Sam Stein @samstein 1h
Kavanaugh's decision is just him defending racial profiling
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