No. of Recommendations: 12
Just as I thought Kavanaugh is relying on a case deciding Border Patrol agents can use Mexican appearance near the southwestern border. The 70s case uses mode of dress and haircut, physical characteristics, but that's near the Southwestern border, not Chicago or LA. It looks like the USSC is signaling an expansion of that case, potentially to the entire US. The step after that is to not limit it to just immigration and we're back to the old racial profiling with a little extra things tossed in so it isn't just racial profiling.
SNIP The Vasquez Perdomo lawsuit tests the Fourth Amendment’s limits regarding what constitutes “reasonable suspicion.” In its application for a stay from the Supreme Court, the
government relied on United States v. Brignoni-Ponce, a 1975 decision in which the court concluded that Border Patrol agents can consider “Mexican appearance” to gauge potential violations of immigration law near the country’s southwestern border. To identify who looks Mexican, agents can consider “mode of dress and haircut,” Justice Lewis Powell wrote on behalf of his colleagues. Powell acknowledged that there are many U.S. citizens with “the physical characteristics identified with Mexican ancestry,” but
“[t]he likelihood that any given person of Mexican ancestry is an alien is high enough to make Mexican appearance a relevant factor [near the Southwestern border].” The justices were especially swayed by the government’s claim that there were between 1 and 12 million unauthorized migrants living in the United States in the early 1970s – 85% of whom, immigration officials said, were Mexican citizens. Whether a person appears to be Mexican is just one of many factors that officers can consider “in deciding whether there is reasonable suspicion to stop a car in the border area,” the court announced.
Kavanaugh’s concurrence in Vasquez Perdomo relies heavily on Brignoni-Ponce’s acceptance of race-based immigration policing. Across his 10-page opinion, Kavanaugh cites Brignoni-Ponce nine times. Five of those references come in two paragraphs explaining that the Fourth Amendment favors the government’s position. The Fourth Amendment gives law enforcement officers the flexibility to consider “any number of factors,” Kavanaugh explained, quoting Brignoni-Ponce. For that reason, immigration agents in Los Angeles and surrounding counties could constitutionally consider the “high number and percentage” of migrants living in the region in violation of immigration law; that they “tend to gather in certain locations” to look for work; that they “often work in certain kinds of jobs, such as day labor, landscaping, agriculture, and construction” because these “do not require paperwork”; that many “do not speak much English”; and their “apparent ethnicity.” To Kavanaugh, it is constitutionally permissible and “common sense” that these factors “constitute at least reasonable suspicion of illegal presence in the United States.”
Despite going to the effort of providing his reasoning, Kavanaugh does not explain how immigration agents determine which people “do not speak much English” or how they identify ethnicity. He notes, correctly, that “many” people living in the Los Angeles area without the federal government’s permission “come from Mexico or Central America.” But it is one thing for a person to have been born in a particular eight-country region (which includes Belize, where English is the official language and about three-quarters of the population speak it) and another thing for immigration agents to know, first, where a specific individual hails from and, second, how much English they speak.
Neither country of origin nor English-language ability are readily apparent through observation, and neither is a good indicator of a person’s legal right to live in the United States. In Los Angeles County alone, more than half of residents who were born outside the United States are naturalized U.S. citizens. Meanwhile, in a county where 55% of the population ages five and older speaks a language other than English at home but 58% of that group also speak English at least “very well,” according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau, there is every reason to think that most of the people in L.A. who speak a language that isn’t English also speak a lot of English. For that reason, in a region where multilingualism is common, the language that agents hear a person talking – assuming they even do hear a person talking before stopping them – is not a good indicator of what languages the person can speak. SNIP - More
https://www.scotusblog.com/2025/09/justice-brett-k... 