The United States Supreme Court just scored a “major victory” for the Department of Homeland Security after lifting a federal judge’s order barring federal agents from making stops without “reasonable suspicion.”
In the 6-3 decision made by the conservative majority court, Justice Brett Kavanaugh upheld that while ethnicity can not be the sole reason for a stop, it can still be considered a “relevant factor” to reasonable suspicion.
However, other factors taken into consideration include accents, spoken language, and the workplace environment.
In practice, this means working-class people who look and sound different to Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agents are the target.
What the Supreme Court just upheld is that if a federal agent saw a low-income factory worker who did not look or sound close enough to their American citizen prototype, they could stop that person.
That is not a fear-mongering extreme example, but rather what we are seeing happen in our country right now.
Factory workers are being detained, previous policies requiring details and supervisor approval about ICE targets before a raid have been abandoned, and agricultural, construction and hospitality industries have taken blows.
More than half of Americans disapprove of ICE conducting more raids where people in the U.S. illegally may be working .
Most Americans want immigration enforcement to be focused on violent offenders.
Yet an overwhelming majority of ICE detainees have not had criminal convictions.
The United States has the second-highest Spanish-speaking population in the world.
The Latino population is the second-largest ethnic group in the United States, contributing to a significant working-class population.
It is hard to say those attributes are embraced or accepted by the government when they are “relevant factors” to “reasonable suspicion.”
So did the Supreme Court just green-light racial profiling, and if so, should we stand by while families and members of our communities are subjected to it?
Contact your congressman, David Joyce, at 440-352-3939. Or remind your county’s sheriff that immigration enforcement is not their job above protecting the community at 330-678-7012.
Tanner Smith is a columnist. Contact him at [email protected].