Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court quietly made one of the most dangerous immigration rulings in decades. In a 6-3 decision in Noem v. Vasquez-Perdomo, the Court used its “shadow docket” to lift a lower court ban on ICE’s “roving patrols” in Los Angeles.
What does that mean in plain language? This means that ICE agents now have the legal cover to stop, question, and detain people based on appearance, language, accent, workplace, or any other marker that “looks suspicious” to them. In other words, the Court just gave its blessing to racial profiling on a massive scale—and they did it without a full briefing or hearing and without explaining their reasoning.
This is not just about undocumented immigrants. This is about every Latino in this country—citizen, resident, or otherwise—who now has to wonder if going to work, speaking Spanish, or standing outside a Home Depot makes them a target. And if the history of racial profiling in this country tells us anything, it’s that law enforcement will almost always lean on the “easiest” factor—skin color, accent, or language—rather than a combination of subtle clues. The Court knows this, and it green-lit it anyway.
The way the Court issued this ruling makes it even more dangerous. It wasn’t through a full hearing or a published majority opinion. The ruling was issued on the “shadow docket,” a process for issuing procedural orders and deciding rare emergency requests for relief but increasingly used to decide major issues—abortion, voting rights, and now immigration profiling.
Unlike cases on the “merits docket,” shadow docket rulings bypass the transparency of full briefing from the parties and oral arguments, and the accountability of written explanations. Without reasoning, there’s no clear legal guidance for lower courts or law enforcement. That vagueness is the point. It allows agents to abuse power while hiding behind the ambiguity of the Court’s silence. Officers will see the headline, not the nuance, and interpret this as a green light to profile Latino communities across the country. When justice is delivered in the dark, rights disappear in the daylight.
The Fourth Amendment is supposed to protect all of us from unreasonable searches and seizures. Immigration enforcement has always lived in a gray zone where “reasonable suspicion” was enough to trigger an investigation. Reasonable suspicion was never supposed to mean race, accent, or the neighborhood you’re standing in. But this ruling opens the door for exactly that.
In his concurring opinion, Justice Kavanaugh even wrote that ICE can consider those factors in combination, as if law enforcement officers don’t already default to race alone when given permission. His argument that people will be fine as long as they carry identification shows a profound detachment from reality. How many of us walk around with a passport, a birth certificate, or even a Social Security card? And even if we did, what prevents ICE from detaining or assaulting someone before they get the chance to show it?
That is exactly what happened to Jason Gavidia, a U.S. citizen born in Los Angeles, who was thrown against a fence and assaulted by ICE agents despite screaming that he was an American. They confiscated his ID and never gave it back. Next time he’s stopped, what proof does he have left? Kavanaugh doesn’t have to worry about being profiled. His race, class, and position shield him. His arguments ignore the reality for millions of people who do not share his privilege.
And we have seen this all before. Arizona’s “Show Me Your Papers” law created open season for Sheriff Joe Arpaio to harass Latinos on nothing more than skin color and accent. New York City’s stop-and-frisk program turned Black and Latino men into daily suspects until courts declared it unconstitutional. Japanese Americans were interned en masse based solely on ancestry. Slave patrols once prowled for free Black people, re-enslaving them on the presumption they “must” be runaways. Racial profiling is not an aberration. It is an American tradition, one that resurfaces whenever politicians and courts give law enforcement permission to indulge it.
Justice Sotomayor understood this when she wrote her dissent. She warned that ICE should never be allowed to stop people just for being Latino. She called the ruling a betrayal of constitutional values and a dangerous normalization of discrimination. She knows that the so-called “combination of factors” argument is just a slippery slope toward the same abuses we have always seen. She knows that this decision will not just sweep up undocumented immigrants but citizens and permanent residents alike. And she knows that once law enforcement is trained to see a community as suspect, that stigma does not disappear—it spreads and infects every part of policing.
Some people will dismiss this case as “just about immigration,” but they are wrong. This ruling destabilizes public safety itself. Real safety requires trust between communities and law enforcement. When entire neighborhoods fear that an accent, a workplace, or a face is enough to trigger detention, cooperation evaporates. Victims and witnesses stop calling 911. Families stop reporting crimes. Neighborhoods retreat inward, not because they don’t care about safety, but because the police have made it unsafe to come forward. ICE does not act alone. Information-sharing with local police is routine, which means the culture of profiling will bleed into local law enforcement, spreading fear even further.
The Supreme Court knows how unpopular racial profiling is when exposed to daylight. That is why they buried this case in the shadow docket, why there was no full hearing, and why there was no majority opinion. They know that if people truly understood what had been decided, the outrage would be overwhelming. Instead, they normalized it quietly, trusting that the next election cycle and the next culture-war distraction would keep most people from noticing.
But we cannot afford to look away. This is not the final word—cases will continue, advocates will fight, communities will resist. But we need to be clear-eyed about what just happened. The Court sent a message to ICE: you are free to profile. And unless we push back, ICE agents will take that freedom and run with it, in Los Angeles, in Chicago, in Queens, and beyond. The question now is not just what ICE will do with this ruling—it is what we will do in response.
Will we accept a country where Latino citizens are forced to prove their citizenship on demand? Where language, accent, or workplace can be turned into suspicion? Where the Constitution bends depending on who you are and how you look? Or will we demand a country where rights are not contingent on appearance, where law enforcement cannot terrorize communities under the excuse of “reasonable suspicion”?
History has already shown us where this road leads. The only way to change course is to refuse to walk it.