On September 8, 2025, the Supreme Court quietly voted 6–3 to let federal immigration agents resume raids in Los Angeles. In Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo, the Court granted the government’s emergency request on its so-called “shadow docket,” with no oral argument, no briefing, and no warning to the public.
The order was a single sentence. Its impact is anything but. Millions now live under the knowledge that they can be stopped, questioned, and detained simply for being brown, speaking Spanish, or standing at a bus stop. What lower courts called racial profiling, the Supreme Court has—at least temporarily—allowed to continue.
This is not a final ruling on the merits. Yet the Court’s choice to act in silence and haste signals more than temporary relief for the government. It shows a willingness to weaken the demand for individualized suspicion in favor of broad, probability-based policing—and to do so without the transparency that constitutional change deserves.
What the Court Decided
The case arose after armed, masked agents swept through Los Angeles this summer. They targeted bus stops, car washes, day-laborer pickup sites, and public parks. People were detained on sight. U.S. citizens were among them: one man shoved against a fence until he produced a REAL ID, another hauled to a warehouse for questioning despite showing a driver’s license.
In July, a federal judge stepped in, issuing a temporary restraining order prohibiting ICE and DHS from conducting stops based solely on four factors:
1. Apparent race or ethnicity
2. Speaking Spanish or English with an accent
3. Presence at certain locations (bus stops, day laborer pickup sites, car washes, farms, etc.)
4. Type of work (manual labor jobs commonly held by undocumented workers)
The judge found “ample evidence” that DHS relied only on those factors—often with violence and without basic questioning—and ruled the seizures unconstitutional. The Ninth Circuit largely upheld the order.
The government sought emergency relief from the Supreme Court. The Court granted it. Justice Kavanaugh wrote separately, stressing the government’s “fair prospect” of success. Justice Sotomayor, joined by Justices Kagan and Jackson, filed a blistering dissent, warning the Court had authorized “flagrantly unlawful” conduct.
What the Court Didn’t Decide
The Final Word
This was not a merits ruling. The Court did not declare racial profiling constitutional. It said only that the government had shown enough to pause the injunction while litigation continues.
An Open Endorsement of Racial Profiling
Justice Kavanaugh insisted ethnicity “alone” cannot justify a stop. But by allowing it as a “relevant factor” alongside language, job, and location, the Court created a blueprint for racial profiling without naming it as such.
Use of Force Issues
The order claimed only to regulate when stops may occur, not how force is wielded. But as the Dissent recounted—rifles fixed on unarmed civilians, workers tackled to the ground, crowds choked with tear gas—permission to stop, in practice, is permission to escalate.
Life Under the Stay
Greenlight for Indiscriminate Raids
With the injunction stayed, DHS and ICE can continue “Operation At Large” in Los Angeles—mass raids at bus stops, day-laborer sites, car washes, parks, and workplaces. Agents may stop people who “fit the profile.” In practice, that means open racial profiling.
Latinx Communities Targeted
By blessing these factors in combination, the Court effectively makes Latinxs presumptively suspicious. Citizens and lawful residents will continue to be stopped until they prove otherwise.
Fear as Daily Reality
The Dissent captured the ripple effect: parents carrying passports to school pickups, workers avoiding shifts, families skipping parks and church events. Some described the raids as kidnappings. This is precisely the “arbitrary interference” the Fourth Amendment was designed to prevent.
Presumed Undocumented
The Constitution requires the government to justify a seizure with reasonable suspicion. In practice, Latinx residents must now justify their right to stand in public. Citizens already detained had to produce passports, REAL IDs, or driver’s licenses just to go free. Kavanaugh’s assurance that questioning is “typically brief” only underscores the inversion—it presumes citizens should be prepared to prove their status on demand. That is not the Fourth Amendment. It is the presumption of undocumented status built into daily life.
The Stakes Beyond Los Angeles
The Collapse of Individual Suspicion
The Fourth Amendment requires “specific, articulable facts” tied to an individual. Courts have long warned that generalizations sweeping up “large categories of innocent people” are unconstitutional. Yet Justice Kavanaugh leaned on a strained reading of United States v. Brignoni-Ponce, a 1975 border case. By combining race, language, job, and location into a “totality,” he turned sweeping generalizations into individualized suspicion. Its effect is to normalize racial profiling by aggregation.
Standing as a Shield for Misconduct
Justice Kavanaugh also invoked Los Angeles v. Lyons, where the Court blocked systemic challenges to LAPD chokeholds because the plaintiff couldn’t prove he’d be choked again. The same move here: even in the face of evidence that citizens and residents are repeatedly detained, plaintiffs supposedly can’t show it will happen to them again. The effect is to block systemic challenges to systemic abuses.
The Shadow Docket and Constitutional Drift
A single sentence, issued in silence, now reshapes daily life for an entire city. The Court acted through its emergency docket—no merits briefing, no argument, no reasoning. What once handled scheduling is now where constitutional meaning shifts in silence. As Justice Sotomayor warned, the Court once again used a bare-bones order to bless “flagrantly unlawful” conduct.
Risk of Entrenchment
Should this case return on the merits, the Court could cement a new rule: race + language + job + location = reasonable suspicion. That would mark a historic weakening of the Fourth Amendment, legitimizing racial profiling wherever the government invokes immigration.
The Test Ahead
The Supreme Court has not yet declared that ICE may stop anyone who looks Latino, speaks Spanish, or works a low-wage job in Los Angeles. But by staying the injunction, it has made that the daily reality for millions of Latinx residents across Los Angeles County and City. Families already feel it at bus stops, in schools, on job sites, and in their own neighborhoods.
The Court may ultimately narrow the Fourth Amendment, but liberty is not a single clause—it is a promise written fifty times over. State constitutions remain shields against profiling and suspicionless policing, but only if the people insist on their protection.
At Brown, Goldstein & Levy, we are committed to protecting the civil and human rights of all people – no matter their race, ethnicity, national origin, gender, religion, disability, sexual orientation or gender identity. If your civil rights have been threatened as a result of ongoing actions from the federal government, contact us today. Our attorneys will fight for your rights, no matter who the opposition is or how high the stakes are.
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1 See Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo, No. 25A169, slip op. at 2–3 (SOTOMAYOR, J., dissenting); see also José Olivares, US citizen detained by immigration officials who dismissed his Real ID as fake, THE GUARDIAN (May 24, 2025), www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/may/24/us-citizen-detained-ice-real-id.
2 See Reid v. Georgia, 448 U.S. 438 (1980).
3 422 U.S. 873 (1975).
4 461 U.S. 95 (1983).
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