A recent decision in a disheartening term for the United States Supreme Court should strike a note of caution on the East End. On Monday, a court majority issued an unsigned ruling that allowed immigration officers tremendous leeway in stopping people they suspect might be in the country illegally or awaiting an asylum hearing. This overturned a previous lower-court ruling that federal agents were illegally basing stops solely on race, ethnicity, or because someone speaks Spanish. Under the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, individuals regardless of background have the right to be free from arbitrary interference by law enforcement.
Put simply, police cannot choose to stop someone just because he or she looks “foreign.” Nor can officers accost people just because they happen to be at locations like farms or pickup sites for day laborers or because of the type of work they do. One’s appearance, speech, or skin tone did not add up to reasonable suspicion of law-breaking — until this week, that is.
In a strongly worded objection, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote, “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. Rather than stand idly by while our constitutional freedoms are lost, I dissent.” She was joined in opposition by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.
On its face, Monday’s ruling appears to contradict other recent decisions. As any number of observers have pointed out, the Supreme Court has said that colleges and universities cannot use race as a factor in admissions, but federal agents can use race as a factor in detentions. Though there may be subtleties that differentiate the two, the disconnect is stark.
Local law enforcement across the county should resist the round-them-up mentality of the current administration. We hope that police here will publicly restate their commitment to uphold the actual U.S. Constitution, not a gutted version of it put forth by a rogue Supreme Court.