In a chilling decision that effectively shreds the Fourth Amendment, the United States Supreme Court has given Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents a green light to engage in blatant racial profiling. In a 6-3 ruling handed down from its increasingly scrutinized “shadow docket,” the court’s conservative majority decided that federal agents do not need reasonable suspicion to target someone for an immigration stop. The message is clear: in the eyes of this court, your skin color, your accent, or the type of work you do is now grounds for federal agents to detain you.

The decision temporarily overturns a lower court order that was a rare beacon of constitutional sanity. U.S. District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong had previously found that ICE raids in Los Angeles were conducted illegally and in direct violation of the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable searches and seizures. Her order specifically prohibited ICE from using four racially charged justifications for arrests: a person’s apparent ethnicity, the language they speak, their presence at a location frequented by immigrants, or their line of work.

The Trump administration, in one of its many parting shots at civil liberties, had asked the Supreme Court to block this order. The court’s right-wing bloc dutifully obliged.

Writing for the majority, Justice Brett Kavanaugh penned an opinion that reads like a user’s manual for constitutional erosion. He argued that the Immigration and Nationality Act allows agents to “interrogate any alien or person believed to be an alien,” and that the “totality of the circumstances” could justify a stop. What are those circumstances? According to Kavanaugh, they include being in an area with a high immigrant population, working in jobs like landscaping or construction, coming from Mexico or Central America, and not speaking much English.

In a stunningly dismissive passage, Kavanaugh writes, “To be clear, apparent ethnicity alone cannot furnish reasonable suspicion; under this Court’s case law regarding immigration stops, however, it can be a ‘relevant factor’ when considered along with other salient factors.”

This is legal hair-splitting designed to mask the odious reality: the Supreme Court has just sanctioned a dragnet based on racist stereotypes. It has declared that looking or sounding a certain way makes you a target. This isn’t the first time the Supreme Court has chosen to ignore or rewrite major parts of the Constitution to achieve a political end. From gutting the Voting Rights Act to unleashing a flood of corporate money into politics with *Citizens United*, the court has a troubling history of voiding constitutional protections without the consent of the people. This ruling is another brick in that wall, proving yet again that today’s conservative majority often functions as a rubber stamp for right-wing causes, casting aside precedent and the merits of the case itself.

California Attorney General Rob Bonta condemned the ruling, calling it “very disturbing.” He rightfully identified the practice as enabling “the use of race to potentially discriminate,” and stated plainly what the court’s majority tried to obscure: it is unconstitutional “for ICE agents, federal immigration officers, to use race, the inability to speak English, location or perceived occupation to … stop and detain, search, seize Californians.”

The ruling gives enormous, unchecked power to an agency that has already proven it cannot be trusted. Under the Trump Administration, ICE underwent a massive hiring spree that saw standards lowered, unleashing a wave of unqualified personnel who have been accused of abusive and illegal tactics. The source report noted that citizens and immigrants alike were being detained “by masked and sometimes armed men.” Now, these same agents have been told by the highest court in the land that their thinnest, most prejudiced hunches are legally sound.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in a blistering dissent joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, cut through the majority’s jargon to expose the terrifying human cost. “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 wrote. “Rather than stand idly by while our constitutional freedoms are lost, I dissent.”

Sotomayor highlighted the real-world fear this decision instills. She pointed to a Latino U.S. citizen who now “feel[s] like [he] need[s] to carry [his] passport for protection, in case federal agents stop [him] again.” She described another American citizen who refuses to carry his passport because he believes “as an American, he should not have to live like that in his own country.”

Kavanaugh’s opinion callously dismisses these legitimate fears, suggesting that for legal citizens, any questioning is “typically brief and those individuals may promptly go free after making clear to the immigration officers that they are U.S. citizens.” This is a deeply naive and privileged view that ignores the terror of being accosted by armed federal agents, the humiliation of having to “prove” your own citizenship, and the potential for any encounter to escalate. He further opines that the interests of undocumented people are not “weighty” in the eyes of the law, a dehumanizing legal calculation that strips them of basic dignity.

His logic is a constitutional travesty. The Fourth Amendment was written to protect all “people” – not just “citizens” – from arbitrary government seizure. This court has decided that protection is conditional. As Sotomayor warned, the federal 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.”

In Los Angeles alone, there are roughly 2 million Latino or Hispanic people. Nationally, they represent 19% of the population. This ruling places a target on the back of tens of millions of Americans, turning everyday life into a gantlet of potential suspicion. It is a blatant violation of the Fourth Amendment, green-lit by a court that seems determined to dismantle the very foundations of American liberty to serve a partisan agenda.