Supreme Court Allows Pre-textual Racial Profiling.

Imagine a world where cops roamed the financial district and stopped white men, demanding to see their bank account information and all their financial transactions. Hard to believe it ever happening? That is a world that the Supreme Court has just endorsed, in theory.

The Court has handed down a ruling allowing racial profiling to go on by ICE agents. In the words of Kavanaugh, writing for the conservative six, it is okay to racially profile someone sometimes, if you say that race was only one component of your decision:

Whether an officer has reasonable suspicion depends on the totality of the circumstances. Brignoni[1]Ponce, 422 U. S., at 885, n. 10; Arvizu, 534 U. S., at 273. Here, those circumstances include: that there is an extremely high number and percentage of illegal immigrants in the Los Angeles area; that those individuals tend to gather in certain locations to seek daily work; that those individuals often work in certain kinds of jobs, such as day labor, landscaping, agriculture, and construction, that do not require paperwork and are therefore especially attractive to illegal immigrants; and that many of those illegally in the Los Angeles area come from Mexico or Central America and do not speak much English. Cf. Brignoni-Ponce, 422 U. S., at 884–885 (listing “[a]ny number of factors” that contribute to reasonable suspicion of illegal presence). To be clear, apparent ethnicity alone cannot furnish reasonable suspicion; under this Court’s case law regarding immigration stops, however, it can be a “relevant factor” when considered along with other salient factors. Id., at 887.

Obviously, under this ruling, the story I laid out above could come to be. White men congregating in financial districts and doing high finance jobs have a higher rate of financial criminality than almost anyone else in the country, absent retail wage theft. Obviously, the police should be allowed to go into those districts, detain anyone they see who meets those criteria and get access to their personal and professional financial records. Of course, the Court was referring to Spanish speaking people who work construction jobs, not rich fsckers ripping off pension funds, but the logic is precisely the same. And just stating that logic refutes it.

Obviously, being of a certain race in certain work is not a reasonable basis for detaining anyone. Innocent people should not suffer because some people who look them and do the same work as them might or might not be violating a law. Pretending otherwise is just an open excuse for cops to harass anyone they do not like. If this case had been about an overzealous financial prosecutor, there would be no question. But because this is a stone cold racist Administration, and because this Court’s only guiding principle is Trump may do what he wants, logic, commonsense, precedent, and decency go out the window.

This Court is determined to prove to Franklin that we could not keep our Republic. It has allowed Trump to not distribute Congress allocated, it has allowed Trump to fire people Congress protected, and now it is allowing Trump to harass people who he doesn’t think belong in the country. No one is free if racial profiling is allowed because, as should be clear, any race can be subject to it for any reason. It is the kind of “papers, please” tyranny that Americans used to be opposed to. But this Court has little regard for the Constitution or the nature of what it means to be an American. Unless it is reformed, we will never truly be a free country again.

In the meantime, I guess I can look forward to the Court bending itself out of shape to claim it didn’t mean like that when Mayor Mamdani floods the Financial District with armed forensic accountants.