ICE agents accused of racial profiling and using racist slurs in explosive court filing

Sorta. That ruling allowed them to use race as a criteria, but not the criteria for stopping someone. So the ACLU is seeking to prove that racial profiling is the primary and often only sorting criteria ICE is using, which is currently not allowed as far as we know (or it will force the courts to just admit that racial profiling is 100% open season now).

They’re also calling them tonks, which isn’t so much a racial slur but refers to the sound a flashlight makes when they hit someone over the head with it. It’s not just that they’re no-no words, it’s that the language they are using is very much linked to the violence they are also doing.

There are ongoing cases about the Pretti / Good murders also at a minimum, so it’s not an either-or situation.

That’s not to say that any of this is good or acceptable, mind you. The fact that the country didn’t absolutely grind to a halt over all of this is a massive failure, of course.

The case is Vasquez Perdomo v. Noem. Previously in this same case, the Supreme Court seemed to indicate that it was legal for ICE to stop and question people based on their skin color. (They thereby created a new category of stop called the Kavanaugh Stop).

Quoting Justice Kavanaugh:

Here, those circumstances include: that there is an extremely high number and percentage of illegal immigrants in the Los Angeles area; that those individuals tend to gather in certain locations to seek daily work; that those individuals often work in certain kinds of jobs, such as day labor, landscaping, agriculture, and construction, that do not require paperwork and are therefore especially attractive to illegal immigrants; and that many of those illegally in the Los Angeles area come from Mexico or Central America and do not speak much English. To be clear, apparent ethnicity alone cannot furnish reasonable suspicion; under this Court’s case law regarding immigration stops, however, it can be a “relevant factor” when considered along with other salient factors. … Importantly, reasonable suspicion means only that immigration officers may briefly stop the individual and inquire about immigration status. If the person is a U.S. citizen or otherwise lawfully in the United States, that individual will be free to go after the brief encounter. Only if the person is illegally in the United States may the stop lead to further immigration proceedings.

As a legal position, this shit is antithetical to the American way of life, and it’s also deeply unrealistic. These things are not “brief encounters”. This opinion would legalize “papers please” style enforcement for brown people.

Now, the Kavanaugh Stop is not currently the law of the land, because Kavanaugh was writing in a concurrence only. He didn’t have a full five vote majority behind these abhorrent statements.

So this is the news: Everyone knows that ICE are racist cunts. The ACLU is doing the work to prove it in court. And hopefully it will lead to something that doesn’t cement the Kavanaugh Stop as case law.

I agree that the facts in this article are not excessively interesting. It’s just garden variety racism.

The real audience for this prelim injunction is not the public, however. It’s the 9 justices of the supreme court. In particular, there are 2-3 justices who appear to get all their facts from Fox News. And the evidence introduced for this prelim injunction is the ACLU’s primary opportunity to challenge the Fox News “facts” with “alternative” facts, when this case goes back up to the supreme court.