By Blox Content Management

Copyright keenesentinel

A majority of Americans rightly want a secure border and respect for our nation’s immigration laws.

But we believe that most Americans will recoil at what appears to be an ongoing abuse of fundamental constitutional principles in the Trump administration’s approach to immigration enforcement.

Last Monday, in granting a stay to a California court’s enjoinment of certain Trump administration policies, the U.S. Supreme Court gave approval for people, including U.S. citizens, to be stopped and questioned based on their ethnicity, language, accent and the type of work they do. That is wrong, full stop.

Too often, the Supreme Court has used its emergency docket to support the administration’s expansion of executive powers with little or no explanation.

In this case, Justice Brett Kavanaugh did shine some light on his thinking, at least. But what he offered only enhanced our concern.

Kavanaugh concluded that law enforcement is within the law when officers’ use of “common sense” helps them decide whether to question a person about their immigration status. While ethnicity can’t be a single tell, it can go hand in glove with other factors such as language and physical location.

That alone is worrisome. According to Census Bureau data, some 19 percent of people in the U.S. were of Hispanic origin as of 2023. While the majority of them are English proficient, many are not. Should they be subject to questioning? If their ethnicity and language are a tell, what else qualifies? A beat-up pickup truck? A sticker of the Virgin of Guadalupe?

Kavanaugh suggests that for those stopped who aren’t doing anything wrong, it’s no big deal anyway.

“(F)or stops of those individuals who are legally in the country, the questioning in those circumstances is typically brief, and those individuals may promptly go free after making clear to the immigration officers that they are U.S. citizens or otherwise legally in the United States,” he wrote.

The reality is more complex and often more frightening, as anyone who has ever been stopped and questioned knows. It’s a fact that some U.S. citizens questioned in Los Angeles raids have been pushed against walls, forced to put their hands behind their backs and had their arms twisted.

Our nation has undergone a long and painful journey to recognize that targeting people based on external factors such as race, ethnicity, class and language are beyond the pale of proper law enforcement.

A majority of the Supreme Court has foolishly squandered a share of the progress we have made in accepting this type of enforcement.

As Justice Sonya Sotomayor wrote in dissent, “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.”

We should not. And our Constitution should protect us from that very thing.

— The Dallas Morning News