“Unconscionably irreconcilable” are two words lifted from the dissent of Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor in Noem v. Vasquez (9/8/2025) where a Supreme Court majority approved of a racially based set of criteria in current use by immigration authorities to conduct workplace raids.
In early June, in the Los Angeles metropolitan area, the federal government launched “Operation at Large,” just one of the practices inspired by President Trump’s election promise to engage in the largest mass deportation program in U.S. history. OAL involves raiding a workplace. Throughout the summer dozens of immigration police teams were deployed in L.A. and surrounding counties to worksites where employers regularly violate immigration laws by hiring noncitizens who don’t have work permits and can’t show proof of legal residence (the green card) or U.S. citizenship.
In those workplaces noncitizens are hired for unskilled tasks and are paid low hourly wages, with no benefits or job security.
The government’s OAL program involved stopping individuals while at work based on four factors: their apparent race or ethnicity, whether they spoke Spanish or English with an accent, the type of location they were in, and the type of job they appeared to be performing (e.g, hand drying a vehicle at a car wash). During the raids, teams of armed and masked agents, some carrying rifles and handguns, pulled up to car washes, tow yards, farms, and parks and began seizing individuals on sight, often before asking a single question.
When the raids in Los Angeles resulted in the detaining and questioning of several U.S. citizens of Latino descent, a civil rights lawsuit ensued with a petition for an injunctive court order to stop the raids on grounds that the ICE practices violate the Fourth Amendment constitutional right against “unreasonable searches and seizures.” On July 11, 2025, a federal judge entered a temporary order for ICE to stop the raids and the mass unlawful arrests.
The government appealed to the Ninth Circuit and immediately also asked the Supreme Court to use its emergency docket to grant a stay on the federal judge’s order, pending the appeal. The Supreme Court’s decision of September 8 has been viewed as appalling and hurtful to citizens and legal residents of color and Latino descent, including this writer. As Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor penned her dissent in Noem v. Vasquez, she introduced her opinion thus:
“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. Rather than stand idly by while our constitutional freedoms are lost, I dissent.”
In her dissent Sotomayor questions how easily her colleagues in the majority ignored the evidence presented to the district court. The plaintiffs submitted declarations in support of their civil rights claims and described a parade over the weeks of hostile encounters between workers and teams of ICE police, often wearing masks and carrying rifles or handguns, and then jumping out of patrol cars at places like a Home Depot store, a bus stop, or a car wash. The plaintiffs described ICE agents rushing at or chasing people, grabbing them by the arm, throwing them against a fence, or arresting them and taking them to a warehouse for questioning.
Nonetheless, the majority granted the government’s application for a stay and the injunction against the raids was lifted.
The Supreme Court approved of Operation at Large and its reliance on the four factors listed above to raid workplaces. In dissent, Justice Sotomayor highlighted the egregious impact of allowing these workplace raids to continue. For the majority have rubber stamped a systematic use of government power to target large segments of the U.S. citizen population solely based on their race and ethnicity, their language, their location and occupation. In other words, if a person is obviously not white, doesn’t speak English, is at a particular place and is showing up for work, they might be seized by ICE agents targeting their workplace that day.
Sotomayor also questioned Justice Kavanaugh’s statement in his concurring opinion that the ICE agents have the expertise allowing them to rely on other non-racial factors during the raids. To which she states, hypothetically they could but probably won’t because the record shows that the government has trained agents to use these factors and there is nothing to suggest they will not use them again for conducting workplace raids.
Below are Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s final words in this troubling decision:
The Fourth Amendment protects every individual’s constitutional right to be “free from arbitrary interference by law officers.” Brignoni-Ponce, 422 U. S., at 878.
After today, that may no longer be true for those who happen to look a certain way, speak a certain way, and appear to worka certain type of legitimate job that pays very little.
Because this is unconscionably irreconcilable with our Nation’s constitutional guarantees, I dissent.