Photo credit: Catalina López-Sánchez

Protesters march against ICE raids and mass deportations in Los Angeles this past summer. Signs like “No one is illegal on stolen land” reflect the same fears raised by the Supreme Court’s recent ruling, which further normalizes the targeting of immigrant communities under the guise of law enforcement.

The Supreme Court just legalized racism. That’s the only honest way to describe its latest ruling. In a 6-3 decision, the Court lifted restrictions that had barred ICE from using factors like ethnicity, language or type of work to justify immigration stops. Now, those “factors” can be considered under the “totality of the circumstances” standard — ambiguous legal framework that effectively permits racial profiling under convoluted legal jargon. 

Democrats will issue statements, Republicans will cheer and immigrant communities will be left with the same fears: parents avoiding school drop-offs, workers skipping jobs and neighbors vanishing into detention centers. Citizenship papers won’t protect you when your accent or skin color makes you a target.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in dissent, warned this ruling opens the door to seizing “anyone who looks Latino, speaks Spanish and appears to work a low-wage job.” The Court insists ethnicity can’t be the “only” factor. But let’s be honest: In a city where millions of us speak Spanish, work blue-collar jobs and have brown skin, those “factors” become a deliberate and calculated trap that will disproportionately target Latino communities. 

How often do these kinds of policies actually affect white men and women? When stop-and-frisk was at its height in New York, police weren’t pulling over Wall Street guys in suits on their way to the subway. They were harassing Black and Brown teenagers walking home from school. At border checkpoints, it’s never the white family in the minivan that gets searched for an extra hour — it’s the Brown guy in the beat-up pickup truck. Funny, isn’t it, how “reasonable suspicion” always seems to land on the same faces?

The message is clear: No matter how long Latinos have been here or if we were born here, our very existence can be treated as suspicious. 

The most dangerous part of this ruling is the normalization of second-class citizenship. When the highest court in our country says it’s acceptable to single people out based on race or language, it tells all communities of color that we will never truly belong. That no matter how much we contribute or how many generations we’ve been here, we’ll always be “other.”

If blatant racism is normalized in Los Angeles, of all places, it will spread everywhere. This is about more than immigration. It’s about the kind of country we want to live in. A country that claims to stand for liberty and justice for all, but subjects its own citizens to constant suspicion due to the color of their skin. A country that has made racial profiling not just routine, but legal. If we allow that, then “justice for all” is nothing but an insincere slogan.

If we want a different future, one where our children aren’t treated as suspects in their own country, then we have to fight like hell to make it clear.