Supreme Court allows roving LA immigration patrols

NEW YORK — The United States Supreme Court again backed President Donald Trump's hard-line immigration approach on Monday, letting agents proceed with Southern California raids targeting people for deportation based on their race or language in a ruling that its liberal justices said makes Latinos "fair game to be seized at any time".

The court granted a Justice Department request to put on hold a judge's order that had barred agents from stopping or detaining people without "reasonable suspicion" that they are in the country illegally, by relying on race or ethnicity, or if they speak Spanish or English with an accent, among other factors.

California Governor Gavin Newsom denounced the court's decision in harsh terms.

"Trump's hand-picked Supreme Court majority just became the grand marshal for a parade of racial terror in Los Angeles," Newsom said in a statement, alluding to the fact that Trump appointed three of the six conservative justices serving on the nine-member court.

The court's brief and unsigned order, issued without any explanation, lifts the judge's restrictions while a legal challenge brought by a group of Latino people caught up in the raids plays out.

The Trump administration quickly vowed to continue "roving patrols". The Republican president returned to office in January, promising to escalate deportations. Immigration raids by masked and armed federal agents triggered street protests in Los Angeles that led him to send military troops in June into the largest city in the most populous US state.

The administration "has all but declared that all Latinos, US citizens or not, who work low-wage jobs are fair game to be seized at any time, taken away from work, and held until they provide proof of their legal status to the agents' satisfaction", Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who in 2009 became the court's first Hispanic member, wrote in a dissent joined by the court's other two liberals.

"Rather than stand idly by while our constitutional freedoms are lost, I dissent," Sotomayor added.

Los Angeles-based US District Judge Maame Frimpong found on July 11 that the Trump administration's actions likely violated the Constitution's Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable searches and seizures. The judge's order applied in an area covering much of Southern California.

Agencies Via Xinhua