Justice Sonia Sotomayor delivered a stinging rebuke of the Supreme Court's decision to clear the way to allow sweeping immigration operations in Los Angeles. The Supreme Court on Monday handed the Trump administration a victory on its immigration policy, overturning a lower court's ruling that had prevented federal agents from enforcing immigration operations based solely on factors such as race, job, location, or the language spoken. Critics of this policy argued that it intruded on people's civil liberties. The conservative majority ruled 6-3 to overturn the ruling, with Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson also joining the dissent. Sotomayor slammed the majority opinion as "yet another grave misuse of our emergency docket." "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," she said. "Rather than stand idly by while our constitutional freedoms are lost, I dissent." She warned that the concurrence 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." The Fourth Amendment would prohibit the government from seizing individuals based on a "set of facts that 'describes a very large category of presumably innocent' people," she wrote. "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. Today, the Court needlessly subjects countless more to these exact same indignities," Sotomayor wrote. Sotomayor concluded by describing the ruling as being "unconscionably irreconcilable with our Nation's constitutional guarantees" to be "free from arbitrary interference by law officers."
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