OPINION: Raul Campillo, City of San Diego Councilmember- District 7
It is a betrayal of the Constitution’s most basic promise: that every person will be judged by their actions, not their appearance.
The court said it is permissible that the stops are based on the following factors: (i) presence at particular locations such as bus, stops, car washes, day laborer pickup sites, agricultural sites, and the like; (ii) the type of work one does; (iii) speaking Spanish or speaking English with an accent; and (iv) apparent race or ethnicity. I ask, if none of those things is itself enough to form a reasonable suspicion, then how can the four of them add up to a reasonable suspicion to believe someone has no status to be in the United States?
By allowing the Trump administration to treat apparent ethnicity, language, and low-wage labor as factors in detaining people, the Court has approved legalized profiling. This is not liberty. This is a return to suspicion by stereotype. The Fourth Amendment, which declares that no person shall be subject to unreasonable searches and seizures, can now be read to say: it is reasonable to profile based on appearance if the person who “looks wrong” happens to be near a low-wage workplace in a city with a large Latino population.
Six justices signed off. Five said nothing at all, simply letting the government continue. Justice Kavanaugh at least put his reasoning on paper — and it has all the justification and logic we should expect of a man who once bragged about drinking beer with Bart and Squee.
The Court emphasized in prior cases the need for particularized and objective suspicion, not vague generalizations about who “might” be undocumented.
Kavanaugh twists this. He calls it “common sense” to treat Mexican-looking men at a Home Depot as suspect, rebranding stereotypes as “circumstances.” He suggests Latinos as a group are statistically more likely to be undocumented, so appearance plus setting equals suspicion. I refuse to
accept that as what the Constitution says or what the American people believe. That is probability tables masquerading as constitutional reasoning.
The Fourth Amendment requires individualized suspicion. Kavanaugh replaces it with statistical discrimination.
Justice Sotomayor sees this for what it is. Her dissent, twice as long as Kavanaugh’s opinion, warns that this effectively licenses ICE to seize “anyone who looks Latino, speaks Spanish, and appears to work a low-wage job.” She is right. What Kavanaugh calls common sense is the very stereotype the Court has rejected in every other constitutional context. I implore everyone t oread Kavanaugh’s ten pages, which seem innocuous, maybe a bit backwards— and then read Sotomayor’s 20 pages, which show you the scam the Court is running on all of us.
The Court’s Break from Its Own Tradition
For decades, the Supreme Court has condemned stereotypes as a basis for government action.
Across these cases, the Court wove a common thread: stereotypes are poison to equal justice.
Yet in Noem v. Perdomo, Kavanaugh shrugs this off. If they’ve said in case law that women cannot be denied spousal benefits because “women are usually dependent,” then Latinos should not be detained because “Latinos are often undocumented.” Both are the worst form of stereotypes—they don’t even have the semblance of truth, or statistical backing. Both betray the promise of equal justice.
Another issue: The Spanish colonized the entire world, from the Philippines in Asia, to Mexico all the way to the tip of Chile and Argentina, to the Caribbean, to Equatorial Guinea in Africa, and Florida in the United States. Latinos come in all colors; some were immigrants, some were slaves, to Mexico and Central America. I don’t know if I should be happy that Kavanaugh simply said “Mexico or Central America” and left other geographies out, or if I should be worried that he didn’t explicitly rule out where other Latino-looking immigrants come from.
The Human Consequence
This is not abstract.
It means a Mexican-American citizen, born in San Diego, may feel compelled to carry a passport to the grocery store. It means a Puerto Rican grandmother — a citizen since 1917 — may tuck her birth certificate into her purse. It means an eighth-generation Californian, whose family lived in Los Angeles when it was still El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles in 1781 — decades before Brett Kavanaugh’s ancestors arrived from Ireland — must wonder: is today the day I end up in handcuffs for leaving my house without papers?
Federal law already requires immigrants to carry documents. That’s in the U.S. Code. But citizens are not required to carry proof of citizenship. The Fourth Amendment protects that freedom. Until now.
So what happens when a Citizen says to an ICE officer, “I don’t have to carry documents, I’m American”? Does the officer let them walk away, acknowledging their rights? Or does their appearance-based suspicion override the assertion of their right to freely move? The Court has left every citizen who got tanned this summer and walks past a place where “immigrants work” in that limbo.
The Money Trail
And why is this policy being defended so fiercely? Follow the money.
By many estimates, 85–90% of detained immigrants are held in private prisons. GEO Group and CoreCivic donate heavily to political campaigns. GEO gave $1 million to Trump’s main SuperPAC. CoreCivic sent hundreds of thousands to the RNC and affiliated committees. Proportionally, 98% of private prison money went to Red candidates, 2% went to blue candidates.
These companies charge, on average, $115 per detainee per day. That’s enough to pay nearly every San Diegan’s rent payment. Every 1,000 immigrants detained for two weeks recoups a million-dollar campaign donation.
Our tax dollars are being siphoned into corporate prison pockets — and the Supreme Court just made it easier to keep the pipeline flowing. As the Buffalo Springfield Song says, “There’s something happening here”—the difference between now and then is that it is exactly clear “what’s going down.”
Back to Everyday Life
This morning I stood in line at a Wells Fargo bank on El Cajon Boulevard. The first eight people in line were Latino, including me. Across the street, a construction crew was at work. Next to me stood a man with a thick brown- and-gray mustache. I am an Ivy League law graduate, just like most of the justices who handed down this ruling. He is a construction worker. But under this decision, if we walk across the street together, our appearance could trigger suspicion.
How dusty would my pants need to get before I look like an undocumented laborer? What if I switch from dress shoes to work boots? What if my Spanglish is good enough to sound fluent? What if I drive a Ford F-250 instead of a Ford F-150? At what point does culture, language, or style become “probable cause” in the eyes of ICE? When I’m ten feet from the construction site, 5, one?
No group of Americans should have to live this way and the Constitution has, until yesterday, been interpreted to support that notion.
So if you look Latino (which means you could be Middle Eastern, a dark-haired Frenchman, an Arab, an Italian who just had a week long beach vacation, a Sephardic or Mizrahi Jew, a Native American, or anyone else with a bit of a tan and brown hair), the Supreme Court said yesterday to carry your passport or your birth certificate or your ID, because if you do, as Justice Kavanaugh says: that individual will be free to go after the brief encounter with law enforcement. Except for those folks who got deported by accident to some place they weren’t born. Brief encounter?
A Republic of Laws — or a Republic of Suspicion
The Supreme Court’s decision ratifies a worldview: that some people are suspicious by appearance alone. That if you have dark hair, dark eyes, and tan skin, if you speak Spanish or look like someone who does, you are less free than your neighbor.
The Constitution demands better. If the Fourth Amendment stands for anything, it is that government must treat us as individuals, not stereotypes. Justice Sotomayor defends that principle. The majority abandons it.
But here’s the truth: we cannot accept a republic of suspicion. We must insist on a republic of laws.
Let me be very clear: I know this is not about me. And this isn’t about law enforcement. I am a former member of law enforcement. I know very well the difference between reasonable suspicion, probably cause, preponderance of the evidence, clear and convincing evidence, and proof beyond a reasonable doubt. And I don’t think anyone up here on the council would ever deign to say I don’t support law enforcement. But like over the past 3 years, right after right after right after right, the right-wing of our supreme court has just said that one of their own, Justice Sonya Sotomayor, you’re better off not showing up in LA with jeans and a long-sleeve white t-shirt next to a Home Depot, otherwise, ya know… common sense says she’s an immigrant who ought to have her papers. That is not liberty.
Because liberty ought not be conditional. Citizenship doesn’t come with those conditions.
The government in all ways must bear the burden of proof that something is wrong, that a person has done something wrong; forcing US citizens of Latino ancestry to carry proof that they can be here is foisting the burden back on them.
And a government that labels criminal suspicion of the darker set of our citizenry as “Common Sense,” is a government that doesn’t have common sense, but instead has lost all sense of right and wrong, and has no sense of what the Constitution guarantees each and everyone of us.