When he was a young man of the Constitutional Law of the UCLA, we learned that the Constitution was not just scroll behind the glass: it was a living, fragile and fierce promise, aimed at protecting people when power overreached.
But on Monday morning, the Supreme Court taught me something new: that those promises, in the hands of a certain type of court, may disappear without discussion, without a hearing, without even a signed name.
In Noem vs. Vásquez Perdomo, most of the judges gave a silent blessing to immigration raids in Los Angeles who go to people to wear Latinos, speak Spanish and work that build this country but never pay enough to live in it.
The decision was reduced without a complete informative session. Without oral argument. There is no rich evidence. Only a shadow of end of summer from Marble Heights.
The ruling allows federal agents to resume raids in Los Angeles and surrounding counties, raids where people are seized without a court order, without particularly suspicion cause. Only skin color, language and hands called.
Judge Sonia Sotomayor refused to let it happen without response. “We should not have to live in a country where the government can take anyone who looks Latin, speaks Spanish and seems to work in a low salary job,” he wrote. “Instead of staying unstable while our constitutional freedoms are lost, dissent.”
His dissent is more than an objection. It is a warning.
What makes this moment relaxing is not only the decision but how it came. The court used the so -called emergency file, a channel that once reserved for true crises such as war orders mandates or stopping imminent executions. No arguments were heard. The reports were not discussed. There are no heavy data in sunlight. This is not ordinary.
The emergency file has become the rear door of the court, where the decisions of vast consequences come without sign, inexplicable and final. Transforming decisions can now avoid the deliberative process that our democracy was created to honor.
California knows these patterns too well. We have a shadow history: Japanese internment orders were once signed here, ice raids now resume here. Los Angeles, with their murals and multigenerational families, has become the test field of fear policy.
Previously in Noem vs. Vásquez Perdomo, an American District Court found that ICE had made resonants in car washed, bus stops and farms based only in appearance and place. There is no crime evidence. There are no arrest orders. Only an intersection of poverty, race and language.
This is exactly the type of behavior that the 4th amendment is prohibited: “Irrazonable searches and seizures.” However, the Supreme Court has now said: if they are brown, apáguelos.
Most offered no reasoning. Only Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh wrote a brief concurrence, calling the necessary decision to avoid the “interruption” of the federal immigration authority.
Rupture? The Constitution itself is intended to be an interruption, a hard brake on the power without control. Remaking the protections of entire neighborhoods is to declare conditional rights.
What follows? Language -based surveillance? Detentions in the workplace by algorithm? Does normalized as a policy?
Noem vs. Vásquez points out that constitutional rights now yield to the application of immigration. That should terrorize all Americans, because once a group loses the same protection under the law, others will follow it.
Sotomayor's dissent may not carry the strength of the law, but it carries something older: the moral memory of a constitution written with hope and too often betrayed in silence. In his words, we hear echoes from Judge John Marshall Harlan in Plesssy vs. Ferguson, who remained only when the majority of the court allowed the racist farce of “separate but equal.”
In 1896, Harlan wrote: “The Constitution is colorblind.”
It must also be blind, daltonic language, blind of poverty, or it is not justice at all.
If the Constitution no longer speaks of millions of brown Spanish speaking workers, no longer speaks for anyone.
We cannot find that silence with silence. We must respond to him, not in whispers, but in a voice that rises from fields and factories, car washed and classrooms, border cities and municipalities. A voice that refuses to forget how justice sounds, which refuses to let this nation forget the purpose of its constitution.
Dean Florez is a former leader of the majority of California Senate, who represents parts of the Central Valley.
