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SOTOMAYOR SLAMS SCOTUS FOR UNCONSCIONABLE RACIAL PROFILING DECISION
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Robert McCoy
September 8, 2025
The New Republic
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_ Every liberal justice on the Supreme Court issued a scathing
dissent in the decision to let ICE resume its racial-profiling
tactics. _
Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, CNN
The Supreme Court on Monday accepted
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emergency request from the Trump administration—this time lifting a
lower court’s order that prohibited roving immigration agents in Los
Angeles from profiling individuals on the basis of race, language,
job, or location.
The majority ruled without explanation, while Justice Brett Kavanaugh
filed a concurring opinion. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by fellow
liberal justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, took her
conservative colleagues to task in a blistering dissent.
“Countless people in the Los Angeles area have been grabbed, thrown
to the ground, and handcuffed simply because of their looks, their
accents, and the fact they make a living by doing manual labor,”
wrote the court’s eldest liberal justice. “Today, the Court
needlessly subjects countless more to these exact same indignities.”
The Fourth Amendment “prohibits exactly what the Government is
attempting to do here,” Sotomayor observed, as the Trump
administration has “all but declared” Latinos in low-wage jobs
“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.”
Kavanaugh’s concurrence, Sotomayor noted, falsely assumed agents are
just conducting “brief stops for questioning” and seizing only
undocumented immigrants.
In reality, they “are seizing people using firearms, physical
violence, and warehouse detentions,” and whisking away American
citizens as well. Further, she wrote, Kavanaugh incorrectly places the
burden of proof during immigration stops not on law enforcement but on
“an entire class of citizens to carry enough documentation to prove
that they deserve to walk freely”—essentially creating “a
second-class citizenship status” that is incompatible with the
Constitution.
In Trump’s second term, the Supreme Court has repeatedly enabled the
president’s lawless excesses via its emergency docket—overruling
lower courts that halt his actions, oftentimes, as on Monday,
providing little or no explanation. Sotomayor’s dissent railed
against these tendencies, calling the decision “yet another grave
misuse of our emergency docket,” whose lack of explanation is
“troubling.”
“In the last eight months, this Court’s appetite to circumvent the
ordinary appellate process and weigh in on important issues has grown
exponentially,” she pointed out. “Its interest in explaining
itself, unfortunately, has not.”
Whereas there are sometimes good reasons for issuing orders without
explanation, other “situations simply cry out for an explanation,”
Sotomayor said—“such as when the Government’s conduct flagrantly
violates the law, or when lower courts and litigants need guidance
about the issues on which they should focus.”
To conclude, Sotomayor wrote that Monday’s ruling means the Fourth
Amendment may no longer protect the rights of people “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. Because this is
unconscionably irreconcilable with our Nation’s constitutional
guarantees, I dissent.”
* Supreme Court
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* racial profiling
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* Justice Sonia Sotomayor
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* dissent
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