Conservative Justices Declare Racial Profiling Just Fine If Mister Trump Asks For It - Balls and Strikes

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Balls and Strikes

On Monday, the Supreme Court’s Republican majority issued an order that allows federal immigration agents in Los Angeles to resume arresting Latino people en masse simply because they are Latino. The conservative justices did not sign the order in Noem v. Vazquez Perdomo; the public only knows who is responsible because Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a dissent, joined by the two other liberal justices. (Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote a concurrence, but no other justice joined it—perhaps they reasoned that it was better to remain silent and be thought a racist fool than to speak, as Kavanaugh did, and remove all doubt.)

Because there is no majority opinion, there is no way of knowing which, if any, of the legal arguments advanced by the Trump administration on appeal the Court actually found convincing. What we do know, from Sotomayor’s dissent and from the lower court opinions that the conservative justices tossed aside, is that people are going to get hurt.

One plaintiff, for example, an American citizen and Latino man named Jason Gavidia, was accosted by masked men with guns as he was working on his car in a tow yard. The agents demanded to know if he was a citizen, and Gavidia told them at least three times that he was. Then the agents asked him what hospital he was born in. When he didn’t immediately remember, Sotomayor recounts in her dissent, “the agents racked a rifle, took Gavidia’s phone, pushed him up against the metal gated fence, put his hands behind his back, and twisted his arm.” The agents only released Gavidia after he handed over his ID card.

“The Government…has all but declared that all Latinos, U.S. citizens or not, who work low wage jobs are fair game to be seized at any time, taken away from work, and held until they provide proof of their legal status to the agents’ satisfaction,” Sotomayor wrote. For Gavidia, that ID card can’t even protect him any longer—the agents never gave it back to him.

The simplest way to predict the outcome of any Supreme Court case is, “What is the result that would be most beneficial to Donald Trump?”
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— Balls & Strikes (@ballsandstrikes.org) 2025-09-09T16:47:58.487Z

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