When the Supreme Court Fails to Protect Civil Rights
September 11, 2025
Privacy Plus+
Privacy, Technology and Perspective
Last week, the Supreme Court delivered another body blow to the United States Constitution when it stayed a district court’s injunction preventing federal immigration agents from conducting mass raids based solely on race, language, location, and type of work. Justice Sonia Sotomayor's scorching dissent in Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo shows how surveillance technology and discriminatory enforcement have combined to create a system where "the Government can seize anyone who looks Latino, speaks Spanish, and appears to work a low wage job."
“Operation At Large”
The case arose from "Operation At Large," a federal immigration enforcement campaign launched in Los Angeles in June 2025. Teams of masked, armed agents raided car washes, Home Depots, farms, and parks, making nearly 2,800 arrests in a single month.
The facts are chilling. Jason Gavidia, a Latino U.S. citizen, was approached by masked agents carrying military-style rifles who asked him whether he was American “at least three times.” Though he responded yes, when he couldn't immediately recall the name of the hospital where he was born, agents "racked a rifle" and "pushed [him] up against the metal gated fence, put [his] hands behind [his] back, and twisted [his] arm." Gavidia was released only after he offered up his REAL ID, which the agents took and never returned to him.
As recounted by Justice Sotomayor, in case after case, agents "jumped out of cars" and began "chasing" and "tackling" Latino workers "without identifying themselves as ICE or police, asking questions, or saying anything else." This was our government conducting mass raids targeting anyone fitting a certain racial and economic profile.
Constitutional Violations and the Court's Dangerous Response
A federal district court granted a temporary restraining order prohibiting agents from conducting stops based solely on four factors: (1) apparent race or ethnicity; (2) speaking Spanish or English with an accent; (3) presence at particular locations; and (4) type of work performed. The court found these factors "describe a very large category of presumably innocent people" and cannot constitute the constitutional requirement for a "particularized and objective basis for suspecting [a] particular person."
The Supreme Court stayed the injunction, allowing discriminatory stops to continue. In a concurrence, Justice Kavanaugh argued that demographic statistics justify broad profiling. But as Justice Sotomayor flatly responded: "aggregate statistics cannot substitute for the individualized suspicion that the Fourth Amendment requires."
Justice Sotomayor's Warning
Justice Sotomayor's most powerful observation addresses the threat to citizenship itself: "The concurrence improperly shifts the burden onto an entire class of citizens to carry enough documentation to prove that they deserve to walk freely. The Constitution does not permit the creation of such a second-class citizenship status."
She also criticizes the Court's increasing reliance on its "emergency docket" (also known as the “Shadow Docket” since the Court rarely explains its decisions there) to circumvent normal procedures, noting the Court's "appetite to circumvent the ordinary appellate process" has grown, while its "interest in explaining itself, unfortunately, has not."
For the complete opinion, click on the following link to Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo at:
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/25a169_5h25.pdf
Our Thoughts
In our view, Justice Sotomayor's dissent is a call for a moral reckoning with what our constitutional system has become. "Operation At Large” reflects the dangerous intersection of technology, data systems, and discriminatory enforcement that we've previously warned about. Automated license plate readers tracking abortion-seekers, Palantir databases aggregating federal data, wide use of facial recognition systems, and now aggregated, non-specific, brutal, and facially discriminatory sweeps are all signposts along the same authoritarian road.
As Justice Sotomayor warned, "we should not have to live in a country where the Government can seize anyone who looks Latino, speaks Spanish, and appears to work a low-wage job." Yet it appears to her – and to us – that that is precisely what the Court's majority has authorized.
Every lawyer and civil rights advocate must speak out against this constitutional assault. Contact your representatives. Support organizations fighting for civil liberties. Protest. Make your voice heard. Chain by chain, the infrastructure of authoritarianism is being built with judicial approval—we must act now.
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New to Privacy Plus+? For additional context, please visit our previous posts, a sampling of which follow:
America's Authoritarian Turn: From Texas Cameras to Federal Databases
Security, Privacy, and Power: Why Lawyers Must Stand Up Now
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Hosch & Morris, PLLC is a boutique law firm dedicated to data privacy and protection, cybersecurity, the Internet and technology. Open the Future℠.