US Supreme Court allows Trump’s controversial immigration raids to continue

The United States Supreme Court has ruled that the administration of President Donald Trump can resume sweeping immigration raids in the city of Los Angeles, casting aside concerns over potential civil liberties violations.

In a 6-3 decision, the conservative-majority court rolled back restrictions on the administration’s aggressive approach to immigration raids, allowing agents to target people based on factors such as language and ethnicity.

Writing a dissent for the liberal minority, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said that the ruling “has all but declared that all Latinos, US citizens or not, who work low-wage jobs are fair game to be seized at any time, taken away from work, and held until they provide proof of their legal status to the agents’ satisfaction”.

The highest US court has rarely placed limits on the Trump administration’s assertions of executive authority. Monday’s ruling invalidates previous restrictions imposed by District Judge Maame Frimpong, who said there was a “mountain of evidence” that immigration agents were violating the constitutional rights of residents in Los Angeles.

The Supreme Court offered little explanation of the reasoning behind the decision, continuing what critics say is a trend of the nation’s highest court annuling the arguments of lower courts without grappling with their content.

“The Supreme Court’s order is outrageous because it includes no reasoning itself but puts on hold the well-reasoned opinions of the lower federal courts,” Cecillia Wang, national legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), a US watchdog group, said in a press statement.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said in a social media post following the ruling that it would continue to ‘FLOOD THE ZONE” in Los Angeles, where the majority of people arrested in immigration raids have had no criminal history.

Frimpong had previously ruled that immigration agents could not target people based on factors such as what language they were speaking or their ethnicity, type of job, or location. The Trump administration had argued that the ruling wrongly restrained immigration enforcement efforts, which have sometimes swept up and detained US citizens as well as people in the US without legal status.

“Individuals with brown skin are approached or pulled aside by unidentified federal agents, suddenly and with a show of force, and made to answer questions about who they are and where they are from,” a lawsuit brought against the government by immigrant rights groups stated.

The Trump administration’s hardline immigration agenda has often been driven by depictions – without evidence – of immigrants as an “invading” force. Government agencies and officials have adopted language previously restricted to hard-right anti-immigrant groups.