When I was a young UCLA constitutional law major, we learned that the Constitution wasn’t just parchment behind glass: It was a living promise, fragile and ferocious, meant to protect the people when power overreached.
But on Monday morning, the Supreme Court taught me something new: that those promises, in the hands of a certain kind of court, can vanish without argument, without a hearing, without even a signed name.
In Noem vs. Vasquez Perdomo, a majority of justices gave a silent blessing to immigration raids in Los Angeles that target people for looking Latino, speaking Spanish and working jobs that build this country but never pay enough to live in it.
The decision came down without full briefing. No oral argument. No record rich with evidence. Just a late-summer shadow cast from marble heights.
The ruling permits federal agents to resume raids across Los Angeles and surrounding counties — raids where people are seized with no warrant, no particularized cause for suspicion. Just skin color, language and calloused hands.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor refused to let it pass unchallenged. “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 wrote. “Rather than stand idly by while our constitutional freedoms are lost, I dissent.”
Her dissent is more than an objection. It is a warning.
What makes this moment chilling is not only the decision but how it came. The court used the so-called emergency docket — a channel once reserved for true crises like wartime injunctions or halting imminent executions. No arguments were heard. No briefs debated. No facts weighed in sunlight. This is not ordinary.
The emergency docket has become the court’s back door, where decisions of vast consequence arrive unsigned, unexplained and final. Transformative rulings can now bypass the deliberative process our democracy was built to honor.
California knows these patterns too well. We have a history of shadows: Japanese internment orders were once signed here, ICE raids now resume here. Los Angeles, with its murals and multigenerational families, has become the proving ground for fear politics.
Earlier in Noem vs. Vasquez Perdomo, a district court found that ICE had conducted roundups at car washes, bus stops and farms based solely on appearance and place. No evidence of crime. No warrants. Just an intersection of poverty, race and language.
This is exactly the kind of conduct the 4th Amendment banned — “unreasonable searches and seizures.” Yet the Supreme Court has now said: If they are brown, seize them.
The majority offered no reasoning. Only Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote a short concurrence, calling the decision necessary to avoid “disruption” of federal immigration authority.
Disruption? The Constitution itself is meant to be disruption — a hard brake on unchecked power. To strip protections from entire neighborhoods is to declare rights conditional.
What next? Language-based surveillance? Workplace detentions by algorithm? Suspicion normalized as policy?
Noem vs. Vasquez signals that constitutional rights now yield to immigration enforcement. That should terrify every American, because once one group loses equal protection under the law, others will follow.
Sotomayor’s dissent may not carry the force of law, but it carries something older — the moral memory of a Constitution written in hope and too often betrayed in silence. In her words, we hear echoes of Justice John Marshall Harlan in Plessy vs. Ferguson, standing alone when the court’s majority allowed the racist charade of “separate but equal.”
Back in 1896, Harlan wrote: “The Constitution is colorblind.”
It must also be language-blind, accent-blind, poverty-blind — or it is not justice at all.
If the Constitution no longer speaks for millions of brown, Spanish-speaking workers, it no longer speaks for anyone.
We cannot meet that silence with silence. We must answer it — not in whispers, but in a voice rising from fields and factories, car washes and classrooms, border towns and city halls. A voice that refuses to forget what justice sounds like, that refuses to let this nation forget the purpose of its Constitution.
Dean Florez is a former California Senate majority leader, representing portions of the Central Valley.
The post Contributor: You look Latino. You speak Spanish. You work hard. That’s now probable cause. appeared first on Los Angeles Times.
