Supreme Court's blanket acceptance of racial profiling [View all]

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.

https://www.heraldnet.com/opinion/comment-supreme-courts-blanket-acceptance-of-racial-profiling/