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Supreme Court Opens Door for Racial Profiling
Posted on Sep 10 2025
On September 8, the Supreme Court allowed the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to continue their unlawful actions in Los Angeles and surrounding counties, at least temporarily. This order reverses the judgments in two lower courts that barred immigration agents in Los Angeles from stopping individuals on the basis of factors including apparent race or ethnicity.
As a legal services organization serving immigrants and refugees, the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota (ILCM) is outraged by the Supreme Court’s decision to allow the continuation of race-based immigration raids. This decision tramples on Fourth Amendment and due process principles, institutionalizing racism and xenophobia. The implications of the highest court in the land allowing racial profiling by immigration agents on even a temporary, geographically limited basis are hard to overstate. It gives explicit license for federal agencies to harass, abuse, and traumatize people based on their presumed race, ethnicity, job, location, or language, effectively pushing the United States deeper into authoritarianism.
The high court’s approval of ethnicity as a “relevant factor” in stops, arrest, and detentions reflects centuries of racism that have been both de jure and de facto. The U.S. immigration system has always considered race, whether through racial and national immigration bans, country quotas, or definitions of whiteness. At no point in the history of the United States have non-white people been free to exist with the same benefits of citizenship as their white counterparts. For much of this nation’s life, whiteness was an explicit requirement for citizenship, and to be denied whiteness or citizenship was to be relegated to underclass status.
For communities that are already facing mounting uncertainty and anxiety in their everyday lives, this represents one more affirmative gut punch that the U.S. government does not recognize their humanity. It is not enough to say that we continue to stand with immigrants. ILCM abhors the continued dehumanization of people of color who seek better lives for themselves and their families, often fleeing dangerous situations created by US imperialism through intentional destabilization. We will fight to ensure that every person is treated with dignity, regardless of immigration status.
The stark reality of this ruling should both gall and galvanize all of us. Sign up for a Bystander Training with MIRAC – Minnesota Immigrant Rights Action Committee or Unidos MN. Join the Court Observer Project. Share Know Your Rights materials. Protect your community. Let history remind us not to stand idly by.