Comment: Supreme Court’s blanket acceptance of racial profiling
Published 1:30 am Monday, September 15, 2025
By Erika D. Smith / Bloomberg Opinion
Some 65 million people living in America today identify as Latino or Hispanic. About 16 million of them live in California. Some are undocumented immigrants, but many are, of course, U.S. citizens or legal immigrants. In Los Angeles County alone, where roughly 1 in 3 residents are immigrants, there are nearly 5 million Latinos. And in the city of L.A., roughly half of its 4 million residents are Latino.
These numbers are important for parsing the dire implications of this week’s ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court, which overturned a federal judge in Los Angeles and essentially gave Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents carte blanche to resume harassing anyone they think might be an undocumented immigrant using little more than racial profiling as a justification.
In a concurring opinion, offering a window into the reasoning of the court’s otherwise silent conservative majority, Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote that “reasonable suspicion means only that immigration officers may briefly stop the individual and inquire about immigration status. If the person is a U.S. citizen or otherwise lawfully in the United States, that individual will be free to go after the brief encounter.”
To be clear, over the summer, some of those “brief encounters” included American-born Latinos being grabbed off sidewalks, slammed against walls, handcuffed and detained because they couldn’t remember something as arcane as the name of the hospital where they were born. Some were detained for only a few minutes. Others were held for days.
This week’s ruling basically means that, for now, federal immigration agents in Southern California now have the undisputed authority to stop almost half the population and demand proof of citizenship.
Yes, Kavanaugh wrote that “apparent ethnicity alone cannot furnish reasonable suspicion.” But his list of other “relevant” factors to be considered, including whether someone, say, works as a gardener or washes cars, or speaks Spanish or English with an accent, doesn’t exactly inspire confidence that agents won’t be targeting people for the flimsiest of pretexts.
White House border czar Tom Homan, of course, disputes that any racial profiling is going on. “Looks are one of many factors you have to consider,” he told Fox News on Tuesday.
The ruling couldn’t have come at a better time for Homan and his boss, Trump. Although it covers seven counties in California, it clearly sends a message that using racial profiling for immigration enforcement is acceptable nationwide. And this week, the Trump administration ramped up its long-promised crackdown on so-called “sanctuary” cities, sending ICE into Chicago, where nearly a third of residents are Latino, for “Operation Midway Blitz,” and into Boston, where a quarter of residents are immigrants and 1 in 5 residents are Latino, for “Operation Patriot 2.0.”
Meanwhile, Southern California is girding for a return of last summer’s indiscriminate raids. That was apparent on Monday, when grim-faced politicians and community activists gathered in a Los Angeles parking lot normally populated by undocumented day laborers looking for work.
L.A. Mayor Karen Bass, who has talked about ICE agents amassing outside of her Latino grandson’s school, warned of what’s at stake not just for her city, but for the entire U.S. “This isn’t just an attack on the people of Los Angeles,” she told reporters. “This is an attack on every person in this city and in every city.”
Like Bass, California Gov. Gavin Newsom emphasized the ruling’s broad effect.
Although he is usually quick to troll MAGA these days, Newsom skipped the sarcasm and instead went with a grave statement, warning that “Trump’s private police force now has a green light to come after your family.” The result will be, he predicted, “a parade of racial terror.”
Bass and other elected officials with deep ties to Southern California’s Latino and immigrant communities have been quoting Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent as if they’re reciting a desperate prayer. “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.”
For Trump, who campaigned on carrying out mass deportations, the angst and the hopelessness is the point. But the attacks on immigrants and Latinos will have dire implications down the line; both economically and politically.
Whether Trump wants to admit it or not, Southern California, with its population of nearly 20 million people and its multibillion-dollar logistics and agriculture industries, is a major driver of America’s economy (which is now conspicuously slowing down). So are the other blue cities that ICE is targeting.
For example, roughly half of the farmworkers in the state are undocumented immigrants, according to University of California-Merced, and many have been living in the U.S. for more than a decade. And in Boston, where ICE raids are also ramping up, half of the workers in the engineering, science and computing sector are immigrants.
Unsurprisingly, Trump’s poll numbers among Latino voters have tanked as the economy has faltered and he has pursued mass deportations, blurring the line between legal and illegal immigrants, and now, between immigrants and native-born Latino citizens. According to a YouGov/Economist poll released last week, 70 percent of Latinos disapprove of the job he’s doing, up from 47 percent after his inauguration.
As it turns out, racial profiling takes a toll, particularly when it’s applied to half the population.
Erika D. Smith is a politics and policy columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. She is a former Los Angeles Times columnist and Sacramento Bee editorial board member.
