Supreme Court Reverses Lower Court and Allows ICE Raids in California to Resume

The Supreme Court has again rebuffed lower courts seeking to block executive actions, from immigration to the downsizing of government. In the latest victory for the Trump Administration, the Court reversed decisions of a federal district court judge and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to enjoin new ICE raids in California.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom and other Democrats proceeded to attack the Supreme Court justices as political hacks. Newsom declared on X that “@realDonaldTrump’s hand-picked SCOTUS majority just became the Grand Marshal for a parade of racial terror in LA.”

U.S. District Judge Maame E. Frimpong, a Biden appointee, in Los Angeles, had found a “mountain of evidence” that enforcement tactics were violating the Constitution. She found that ICE was racially profiling suspects in the operation. The Ninth Circuit upheld the controversial ruling.

An estimated over seventy percent of undocumented immigrants are hispanic.

The Supreme Court summarily tossed the injunction. While the order was issued without an opinion, two justices squared off on the looming issue in the case.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote a concurring opinion arguing that race can be one of the factors used by ICE for the reasonable suspicion to stop a person and inquire about their immigration status: “To be clear, apparent ethnicity alone cannot furnish reasonable suspicion; under this Court’s case law regarding immigration stops, however, it can be a ‘relevant factor’ when considered along with other salient factors.”

Justice Sonia Sotomayor issued a dissent that called the raids troubling and then added “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.”

Sen. Adam Schiff (D., Cal.) beat the drum of dictatorship in a posting to X: “This is blatantly illegal, yet the Supreme Court is allowing it to happen while the case proceeds. When the history of this country’s rapid descent into dictatorship is written, Republicans in Congress and the Roberts Court will have been its primary enabler.”

There was a time when the Court could disagree on the legality of a search without instantly being declared the handmaiden of tyranny. This is clearly not that time. However, the escalating rhetoric on the left is fueling the violence that is rising in cities like Portland.

As I noted this week, there is an emergence of a new Jacobin class of establishment figures and intellectuals seeking to ride the wave of rage on the left. Even a cursory review of French history shows that such enablers are rarely immune from the mob justice that accompanies the rhetoric of rage.