ICE Just Bet Your Freedom on a Racial Profile

The Supreme Court handed down a decision in September that should terrify anyone who thinks showing an ID means they belong here. In Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo, the Court's conservative majority allowed federal immigration agents to resume raids across Los Angeles after a lower court tried to stop them from targeting people based on race, language, workplace, and location alone.

The Fourth Amendment requires reasonable suspicion before law enforcement can detain you. That means specific, articulable facts tied to you as an individual, not sweeping generalizations about entire populations. For decades, courts held that ethnicity alone cannot justify a stop. Neither can speaking Spanish. Neither can working at a car wash.

But Justice Kavanaugh, writing alone, decided these factors become constitutional when combined. Apparent Latino ethnicity plus Spanish language plus manual labor plus presence at a bus stop now equals reasonable suspicion. That formula sweeps in millions of citizens and lawful residents who share those characteristics, inverting the Fourth Amendment's promise of individualized suspicion into demographic detention.

Operation At Large deployed armed, masked agents to Home Depots, tow yards, farms, recycling centers, churches, and parks. They seized people before asking questions, threw them against walls, handcuffed them, and demanded proof of legal status. U.S. citizens were detained for hours until someone brought a passport or birth certificate. One citizen, Leonardo Garcia Venegas, was violently arrested because agents dismissed his Real ID as fake.

Real ID was designed to meet federal standards for state-issued identification. You need proof of citizenship or legal status to obtain one. Yet ICE agents rejected Garcia Venegas's Real ID and held him anyway. If a federally compliant ID means nothing to immigration enforcement, what documentation remains sufficient in the field?

The government never disputed the district court's findings that agents conducted stops based solely on the four enumerated factors. It never challenged evidence that these stops were systematic, had official approval, and resulted in citizens being detained. Instead, it argued the injunction was overbroad and inconsistent with the Fourth Amendment.

Justice Sotomayor's dissent catalogued the consequences. Parents now carry passports to school pickup. Workers skip shifts. Families avoid churches and parks. Naturalized citizens describe the enforcement as kidnapping, not law enforcement. Pedro Vasquez Perdomo, a named plaintiff, was detained without a warrant or explanation, held in cold conditions without food or legal counsel. The Supreme Court ruled that acceptable.

Kavanaugh assured readers that detentions would be brief, that citizens would be released after a quick encounter. His assurance requires believing that asserting citizenship suffices to end the detention. It does not. Citizens detained by ICE remain in custody until someone produces acceptable documentation, which agents determine on the spot with no clear guidance about what qualifies.

Over 21 million voting-age citizens lack ready access to documents proving citizenship, according to the Brennan Center. Half of American citizens do not have passports. Birth certificates require fees, trips to vital records offices, and time many people cannot spare. If ICE decides your driver's license means nothing, you must prove your innocence from detention while agents determine your status.

The Constitution demands government justify seizures with individualized suspicion, not demographic probabilities. Kavanaugh relied on Brignoni-Ponce, a 1975 border case, to argue that high concentrations of undocumented immigrants in Los Angeles justify broader enforcement discretion. But Brignoni-Ponce explicitly rejected stops based on ethnicity alone because they "cast suspicion on large segments of the law-abiding population."

Turning generalizations into individualized suspicion by calling them a totality collapses constitutional protections into statistical profiling. If race plus language plus location plus low-wage work equals reasonable suspicion, then millions of citizens become presumptively deportable until they prove otherwise.

The Supreme Court just made brown skin probable cause.

Garcia Venegas did everything right. He had his Real ID. He stated his citizenship. Agents called it fake anyway and held him in handcuffs for an hour in the summer heat. The system worked exactly as designed—just not for him. The Fourth Amendment still exists on paper. The Supreme Court still claims to uphold it. But for anyone who looks Latino, speaks Spanish, or works manual labor in the wrong location, constitutional protections now operate on a delay while agents determine whether your proof is proof enough.

@Santitos

@salinasmariasantos

Copyright © 2025 Maria Santos Salinas for FRONTeras.

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