The wife of California Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom took aim at the U.S. Supreme Court following a ruling earlier this week favorable to Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s ability to better identify people in the U.S. illegally.
In the ruling, the high court eliminated limits that kept the agency from raiding homes in the Los Angeles region for immigration-related reasons based on broad criteria like speaking Spanish or meeting at places where day laborers typically gather.
“I am sickened by this ruling. Trump’s Supreme Court has reopened the door to dangerous and racially motivated immigration raids in Southern California, leaving families to wonder if heading to work or taking their kids to school could end in detention because of the way they look or talk,” Jennifer Siebel Newsom wrote on the X platform.
“It forces entire communities to live with the terror that their loved ones can be taken away without cause. This ruling strikes at freedom, at dignity, and at the very idea of the American dream. California will never accept this cruelty against our neighbors, residents, and kids, and we will keep fighting,” she added.
Trump campaigned on “mass deportations” of those living illegally in the United States after four years of essentially open border policies adopted by the Biden administration. Several political observers believe the issue helped propel him to a historic win over then-Vice President Kamala Harris.
In their ruling, the justices, who were reportedly split 6-3 along ideological lines, placed on hold a federal district judge’s order limiting what critics dubbed “roving” sweeps by ICE agents.
The judge said that the practices were probably unconstitutional, claiming agents were using stereotypes to stop people at car washes, bus stops, and Home Depot parking lots.
The majority of the high court did not explain why they agreed to the Trump administration’s emergency petition to stop the district judge’s ruling.
However, Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote separately that it is appropriate to conduct brief interviews with individuals who meet several “common sense” criteria for being in the country illegally, including those who work in day labor or construction and do not speak English well or at all.
In their dissent, the three liberal justices – Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and Ketanji Brown Jackson- wrote, “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. Rather than stand idly by while our constitutional freedoms are lost, I dissent.”
Last month, the Justice Department filed an emergency appeal in which they said that the court-ordered limits were like “a straitjacket” for officers carrying out Trump’s mass-deportation policy.
U.S. District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong said in July that ICE agents were “roving patrols” of L.A. and arresting people without “reasonable suspicion” that they were in the country unlawfully. Instead, she said, they seemed to be using color, accent, and line of work as variables that were not legally sound and “seem no more indicative of illegal presence in the country than of legal presence.”
Frimpong, who was appointed by Biden, told immigration officials in the Los Angeles area that they could not use those factors to identify people to enforce.
The Trump administration asked the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals to stop Frimpong’s injunction while they appeal, but a three-judge panel unanimously turned down that request, making only a modest change to Frimpong’s ruling.
The appeals judges were especially worried by allegations that the White House had established a goal of 3,000 immigration arrests every day and that this goal might be leading to illegal arrests.
The Justice Department told the court that there was no such quota, even though Stephen Miller, the Deputy Chief of Staff at the White House, said in a Fox News interview in May that the goal was to arrest 3,000 people.