This partial transcript was computer-generated. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.
Mina Kim: Welcome to Forum. I’m Mina Kim. Attorneys, immigrant rights advocates, and Governor Gavin Newsom are condemning the Supreme Court’s decision last week to lift a temporary order by a federal judge in Los Angeles that barred ICE from detaining people based on where they were, where they worked, or their apparent race or primary language.
Newsom called it an “unleashing of racial terror” and said in a statement: “This isn’t about enforcing immigration laws. It’s about targeting Latinos and anyone who doesn’t look or sound like Stephen Miller’s idea of an American — including U.S. citizens and children.”
This hour, we look at the impact the Supreme Court’s decision is having on the ground. And listeners, are you concerned about being stopped by ICE? Joining me first is Ahilan Arulanantham, law professor and faculty co-director at the Center for Immigration Law and Policy at UCLA School of Law. Ahilan, glad to have you back on Forum.
Ahilan Arulanantham: Thanks for having me again.
Mina Kim: I know you’re very concerned about this. Walk us through the events that led to the Supreme Court lifting an order by a federal judge in Los Angeles. Why did that judge issue the order in the first place?
Ahilan Arulanantham: For those of us living in Southern California, it’s hard not to remember what was happening starting in June. I think it was June 5, when immigration authorities began conducting massive sweeps all over the city — running into different locations and detaining people indiscriminately. They took away people who couldn’t prove to the agents’ satisfaction that they were lawfully present, and others as well — people who were filming the agents, people resisting in different ways.
This continued for several weeks, intensively into July, at Home Depot parking lots, car washes, swap meets, and parks — including parks near where I live. My daughter’s soccer events were canceled because Pasadena shut down the parks after a raid. Raids also happened at grocery markets where Latinos are more likely to shop. It was awful. It was a terrible few weeks where the city’s character really changed.
Mina Kim: And so what led Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong to make the ruling that these sweeps should stop? What were some of the specific things she pointed to?
Ahilan Arulanantham: After a few weeks, the ACLU of Southern California and others filed a lawsuit challenging these stops on the grounds that officers were detaining people based on race and without the suspicion required under the Fourth Amendment. The Fourth Amendment prohibits the government from detaining anyone unless it has reasonable suspicion they’re breaking the law. In the immigration context, that means being in violation of immigration laws.
The legal team built a detailed record of declarations and video — it was all over the internet — showing that agents were indeed stopping people without adequate suspicion. In fact, they were just running into places and detaining everybody. There were U.S. citizens detained multiple times. One person — the owner of a car wash — was detained four times at his own business. Another person was detained repeatedly at her auto shop.
The judge held an evidentiary hearing, heard detailed arguments, and then issued a strong, well-documented ruling that it was unlawful for agents to stop people based solely on a combination of four things: race; language (Spanish, or English with a Spanish accent); place of work (swap meets, fruit vendors, Home Depots); and place of presence (like bus stops). She found that targeting people in those ways violated the Constitution.
That decision significantly changed government practice in July. The Ninth Circuit later upheld most of the order, modifying it slightly. But then the government started violating it again — conducting raids even after the Ninth Circuit upheld the ruling. Finally, the Supreme Court stepped in and stopped the lower court’s order with a “stay” — something it has increasingly done on the shadow docket, particularly with immigration cases.
Mina Kim: Because it was from the shadow docket, the 6–3 majority didn’t articulate reasons for ending the order. But Justice Kavanaugh did write separately. Can you talk about the reasons he gave?
Ahilan Arulanantham: Yes. It’s important to understand that on the shadow docket, the Court often doesn’t give reasons. Justice Kavanaugh’s opinion was only for himself. None of the other five justices in the majority joined it. That’s a way to prevent accountability.
What he wrote was flatly inconsistent with the Court’s own recent opinions. He said race could be used as a factor — not the sole factor, but one factor — in immigration enforcement. He suggested that race plus workplace plus language (Spanish or accented English) might be enough to justify detaining someone.
That’s contrary to what the Court recently said in the affirmative action cases, when it ended affirmative action in university admissions. There, the majority said ending discrimination means ending all of it. Yet here, Kavanaugh suggests the opposite — that race can be used. There was no explanation for how to reconcile that.
And for 25 years, the Ninth Circuit had said immigration authorities cannot use race in enforcement, given that so many people in Southern California are Latino. The record in this case showed 47% of people in the district identify as Latino, and about 35–37% speak Spanish at home. To say that speaking Spanish is grounds for suspicion is preposterous. Anyone in L.A. knows that’s ridiculous. But that’s essentially what Kavanaugh said.
There were other troubling aspects as well. His reasoning, if it became law, would fundamentally change Fourth Amendment protections — shifting from suspicion of individuals to suspicion of entire groups. That’s very dangerous.
Mina Kim: Justices Kagan, Jackson, and Sotomayor dissented. Sotomayor said, “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.”
What do you see as the impact of this, Ahilan? And we’re just coming up on a break.
Ahilan Arulanantham: We’ll have to see. There have already been more raids, though not yet at the scale of June. But this decision greenlights the practices we saw in the summer. If those return, it’s going to be awful.
It will be up to state and local leaders, and to the legal community here, to resist — to force the courts to grapple with what this decision really means. But if ICE returns to what it was doing, it will again fundamentally change life in Southern California. Taco trucks, fruit vendors, people enjoying parks — all of that was disrupted last summer. I truly hope we don’t see that again.
Mina Kim: We’re talking about ICE tactics in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision to temporarily lift a federal judge’s order barring the agency from detaining people without reasonable suspicion. We’ll have more after the break. I’m Mina Kim.
