Supreme Court upends ban on immigration raids based on ethnicity or job site
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- Supreme Court lifted ban on immigration raids targeting job sites or ethnicity
- Ruling permits DHS to resume sweeps in Los Angeles and questions similar bans
- Justices split 6-3, with dissent citing constitutional violations of 4th Amendment
The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday overturned a Southern California judge’s restraining order prohibiting federal immigration agents from detaining people based solely on their perceived ethnicity, the language they speak or their place of work.
The unsigned order is a victory for President Donald Trump’s dramatic immigration raids, which frequently have been conducted by armed, masked agents in camouflage at farms, Home Depot parking lots and car washes, sweeping up people who appear to be Latino and or at places that offer low-wage jobs that may not require proof of eligibility to work in the U.S.
The order will allow the Department of Homeland Security to once again step up its sweeps in the Los Angeles area, and also throws into question a ruling by a federal judge in Fresno banning similar activity in the Central Valley.
The ruling is the latest in a whipsawing series of court decisions over the Trump administration’s immigration raids in California, as appellate courts and the Supreme Court weigh in with sometimes conflicting orders. Last week, a federal judge in San Francisco ruled that the administration’s deployment of the National Guard to Los Angeles to aid in immigration enforcement was illegal. But that case will soon be scrutinized by the 9th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals, which has already expressed skepticism about some of the district court’s analysis.
Monday’s ruling drew scathing criticism from Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, who said it endorsed racial profiling and allowed agents to snatch people off the streets with no due process.
“I want the entire nation to hear me when I say this isn’t just an attack on the people of Los Angeles, this is an attack on every person in every city in this country,” Bass said in an emailed statement. “Today’s ruling is not only dangerous – it’s un-American and threatens the fabric of personal freedom in the United States of America.”
The court’s six conservative justices voted to overturn the July 11 temporary restraining order against the practice issued by Los Angeles U.S. District Court Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong. The practice will now be allowed to continue as the case plays out in Frimpong’s court.
The ruling prompted a sharp rebuke from liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who said she would not stand idly by as constitutional protections against arbitrary arrests were lost.
While the six judges in the majority did not explain their ruling on Monday, Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote a concurring opinion in which he said that it was reasonable to believe that illegal immigrants could be found at car washes, day laborer sites and other locations targeted by immigration officials. Los Angeles, he said, has a significant population of people who are in the country illegally, and many speak Spanish and “often work in certain kinds of jobs, such as day labor, landscaping, agriculture and construction.”
He also supported the use of ethnicity as a factor in deciding whom to arrest.
“To be clear, apparent ethnicity alone cannot furnish reasonable suspicion,” he wrote. “Under this court’s case law regarding immigration stops, however, it can be a ‘relevant factor’ when considered along with other salient factors.”
Moreover, he said, the harm done to the government’s efforts to enforce immigration law was less than the harm done to individuals who might be “briefly detained” before showing the agents that they are legally in the country.
The court’s three liberal justices disagreed strongly in a dissent written by Sotomayor.
She wrote that the court majority’s ruling was an “extraordinary step” to take in opposition to a court decision that ruled the government’s actions were unconstitutional under the 4th Amendment’s prohibition of illegal search and seizure.
“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,” she wrote.
“Rather than stand idly by while our constitutional freedoms are lost, I dissent,” Sotomayor wrote.
The judge’s order had applied to a seven-county region in Southern California — Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, Ventura, Santa Barbara, and San Luis Obispo — where nearly 10 million Latinos live and close to that number speak a language other than English at home, according to court filings.
In a separate case, filed in federal court in Fresno, U.S. District Judge Jennifer Thurston ordered immigration officials to stop targeting people in the Central Valley based on ethnicity, place of work and similar factors. Last week, the United Farmworkers Union and the ACLU filed a motion asking Thurston to step up enforcement of her order, which will be the subject of a hearing on court Oct. 7.
This story was originally published September 8, 2025 at 10:32 AM.
