Again and again in Chicago and elsewhere in recent weeks, masked federal agents have accosted people who appear to be Latino, and have confronted them with questions about their immigration status.
Targeting people for immigration enforcement based on race or ethnicity alone was forbidden by the U.S. Supreme Court in a unanimous decision 50 years ago. After all, it’s impossible to determine the immigration statuses of people simply by looking at them. So for decades, agents seeking to question people about their citizenship were supposed to rely on more than just appearance.
But as President Trump has intensified his mass deportation campaign, roving patrols that have targeted predominantly Latino communities have become a key part of the administration’s playbook. And whether the tactics are legal appears to be an open question, one likely to be decided by the Supreme Court.
Lawsuits challenging the administration’s sweeps in Los Angeles and elsewhere are making their way through the courts. The outcomes could redefine the limits on the discretion officers have to stop, question and detain people over their immigration statuses and how much race and ethnicity can play into those decisions.
“We are in nebulous land,” said Mark Fleming, a lawyer at the National Immigrant Justice Center, which is representing plaintiffs in Chicago. “We have never seen this type of enforcement on the streets ever.”
Last month, in an emergency ruling in the Los Angeles suit, the Supreme Court said federal agents there could question people about their immigration statuses based solely on factors such as race or ethnicity or another spoken language or accented English.
The decision isn’t final, as it overturned the temporary prohibition imposed by a federal judge on officers while she hears arguments on the case. But like many of the justices’ emergency decisions since the start of the new administration, the ruling appeared to signal substantial deference to the executive branch under President Trump and the possibility that the court would ultimately side with him should it ultimately issue an opinion on the case.
It is one of four legal challenges nationwide aiming to curb the warrantless arrests and traffic stops that have become a defining element of the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign.
But even as the lawyers mounting the challenges are hoping to affirm constitutional limits on such immigration stops and apprehensions, experts warn that the lawsuits could end up further emboldening officers to use race or ethnicity in immigration enforcement.
Thomas Coffin was part of the government legal team in the case that led to the 1975 Supreme Court ruling that race could not be the sole factor in immigration stops. Though he and his colleagues lost the case, Mr. Coffin, now 80, said the decision and others had established crucial rights to privacy. But whether they govern the federal agents conducting sweeps on American streets today is, he said, “the $64,000 question.”
During the mass deportation campaign, Latinos have been stopped while driving gardening and landscaping trucks. They have been questioned and detained at bus stops and street corners where laborers gather to wait for work. They have been rounded up at farms, carwashes and construction sites.
José Escobar Molina, 47, who had a temporary form of legal status for immigrants from El Salvador, said he was walking up to his work truck outside his apartment building in Washington, D.C., in August when he was confronted by agents, according to the lawsuit filed in Washington. Without asking for his name, identification or immigration status, the agents handcuffed him and drove him to a holding facility in Virginia, where he was forced to spend the night, he said in a declaration filed in court. When he was released a day later, an ICE agent apologized to him three times for the ordeal, Mr. Escobar Molina said.
In Chicago, where ICE tactics have escalated in recent weeks, lawyers say they have identified dozens of arrests that have violated a 2022 consent decree that covered six Midwestern states. The order — stemming from a 2018 class-action lawsuit that immigrant and civil rights groups filed against the first Trump administration on behalf of five immigrants — restricted federal immigration agents from apprehending and holding people without a warrant.
In court filings, government lawyers have asserted that federal agents are trained in the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits “unreasonable searches and seizures,” and that they should not be hobbled in their efforts to target unauthorized immigrants.
Civil and immigrant rights groups have said the dragnets in different cities have violated the Constitution: Federal agents routinely approach people with brown skin or whom they perceive to be Latinos or immigrants. The agents ask who the people are and where they are from. If people refuse to answer or attempt to leave, they are held or handcuffed and sometimes subdued.
In the Los Angeles case, the lead plaintiff is a man named Pedro Vasquez Perdomo, one of several day laborers arrested at bus stops over the summer. Lawyers for the laborers say that federal agents are stopping Latino workers en masse without having reasonable suspicion, or being able to articulate a legal basis for believing that the people being questioned are in the country illegally.
The legal challenges in Chicago and Washington, D.C., say federal officers are detaining and arresting people without meeting an even higher legal standard of having “probable cause” to suspect that a person is in the country illegally.
A fourth class-action case challenging both stops and arrests was filed in Mobile, Ala., on behalf of Leonardo Garcia Venegas, a Latino construction worker and U.S. citizen born in Florida who was held by immigration officials on two occasions this year.
The judge in the Los Angeles case issued an injunction, prohibiting federal agents in that part of California from conducting stops based on perceived race or ethnicity, or other factors, such as spoken Spanish or accented English.
But after an emergency appeal by the Trump administration, the Supreme Court reversed the judge in Los Angeles. Writing for the court’s conservative majority, Justice Brett Kavanaugh said the injunction would “substantially hamper” efforts to enforce immigration laws in the Los Angeles area. He wrote that agents needed to be able to rely on their training and experience in “determining whether reasonable suspicion exists.”
In a dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said that the court’s decision eroded freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution. “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,” she said.
Before the Vasquez Perdomo decision, the court’s most influential ruling on immigration stops involved an American named Felix Humberto Brignoni-Ponce.
On an evening in March 1973, Border Patrol agents who were staked out on an interstate highway between San Diego and Los Angeles stopped Mr. Brignoni-Ponce’s car because its occupants appeared to the agents to be of Mexican descent.
Upon discovering that two passengers did not have legal status, the federal agents arrested everyone and charged Mr. Brignoni-Ponce, a Marine Corps veteran and U.S. citizen of Puerto Rican ancestry, with knowingly transporting undocumented immigrants. But in a ruling two years later, the Supreme Court upheld a lower court decision throwing out the conviction, finding that officers could rely on “Mexican appearance” as a factor — but not the sole factor — in deciding to stop and question people about their citizenship.
To some critics of racial profiling, the decision seemed like a victory. But the ruling came to be seen by some experts as enabling racial profiling by allowing “Mexican appearance” to be a factor at all.
“Since race can be one factor, in the exercise of discretion, it can become the dominant factor in an immigration stop,” said Kevin R. Johnson, the former dean of the School of Law at the University of California, Davis. “So it’s not surprising that for years you’ve heard the Latino community complaining not unreasonably that immigration stops are based on race.”
Kitty Bennett contributed research.
Jazmine Ulloa is a national reporter covering immigration for The Times.
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