In a 6-3 vote, the Supreme Court gives Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents permission to detain people based on skin color.
A lower court prohibited racial profiling in immigration stops in Los Angeles. Today’s decision by the Supreme Court temporarily lifts that ban as the case heads to a federal appeals court.
On behalf of the dissenting justices, Justice Sonia Sotomayor responded:
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.
Mayor Karen Bass of Los Angeles, where the case originated, called the decision “an attack on every person in every city in this country [that] threatens the fabric of personal freedom in the United States of America.”
