News & Politics

Justice Sonia Sotomayor had harsh words for the Supreme Court in her dissent in a ruling allowing Immigration and Customs Enforcement to continue to arrest people based on profiling Latinos working low-wage jobs.

Monday morning, the Supreme Court of the United States issued an emergency decision in Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo. The case concerns “Operation At Large,” which deployed ICE agents in the Los Angeles area to car washes, bus stops, farms and other locations believed to be frequented by Latino people who may or may not be undocumented immigrants. On July 11, the Central District Court of California ruled that ICE had to stop Operation At Large until appeals in the case could be heard.

The Court’s ruling contained no official explanation for the ruling, however Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote a concurrence. In his concurrence, Kavanaugh said the law allowed ICE to “‘briefly detain’ an individual ‘for questioning’” if they have “a reasonable suspicion, based on specific articulable facts, that the person being questioned . . . is an alien illegally in the United States.”

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Operation At Large, he said, represented “reasonable suspicion” to detain someone on the following factors: “(i) presence at particular locations such as bus stops, car washes, day laborer pickup sites, agricultural sites, and the like; (ii) the type of work one does; (iii) speaking Spanish or speaking English with an accent; and (iv) apparent race or ethnicity.”

He added that “apparent ethnicity alone cannot furnish reasonable suspicion” but could be a “‘relevant factor,” and that if someone detained by ICE turned out to be a citizen, they would be “free to go after the brief encounter.”

Sotomayor disagreed that this is what was happening, citing what had happened to other citizens. Jason Gavidia worked at a Los Angeles tow yard that ICE stopped at. Agents repeatedly asked if he was a citizen. They then took his phone, pushed him against a metal fence, twisted his arm, and took away his identification, according to Sotomayor’s dissent.

“Other Operation At Large encounters have included even more force and even fewer questions. For example, agents pulled up in four unmarked cars to a bus stop in Pasadena; ‘the doors opened and men in masks with guns started running at’ three Latino men who were having their morning coffee, waiting to be picked up for work,” she wrote.

“In Glendale, nearly a dozen masked agents with guns ‘jumped out of . . . cars’ at a Home Depot, and began ‘chasing’ and ‘tackl[ing]’ Latino day laborers without ‘identify[ing] themselves as ICE or police, ask[ing] questions, or say[ing] anything else.’ In downtown Los Angeles, agents ‘jumped out of a van, rushed up to [a tamale vendor], surrounded him, and handled him violently,’ all ‘[w]ithout asking . . . any questions.'”

Sotomayor concluded that Operation At Large and the Court’s decision “all but declared that all Latinos, U. S. 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.”

She also condemned the court for not issuing an explanation beyond the concurrence. She alleged that the Court had been eager to “circumvent the ordinary appellate process” when it comes to President Donald Trump and his administration.

“Some situations simply cry out for an explanation, such as when the Government’s conduct flagrantly violates the law,” Sotomayor wrote, adding that Operation At Large and the Court’s ruling clearly violates the Bill of Rights.

“The Fourth Amendment protects every individual’s constitutional right to be ‘free from arbitrary interference by law officers.’ After today, that may no longer be true for those who happen to look a certain way, speak a certain way, and appear to work a certain type of legitimate job that pays very little. Because this is unconscionably irreconcilable with our Nation’s constitutional guarantees, I dissent,” she wrote.

Image via Shutterstock.

U.S. President Donald Trump is insisting that he deserves to win the Nobel Peace Prize — an assertion being echoed by White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt and other MAGA Republicans.

But in an opinion column published by The Guardian on September 8, Democratic insider Sidney Blumenthal — a former adviser to ex-President Bill Clinton and ex-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton — lays out a variety of reasons why he believes Trump is totally undeserving of that honor.

"His disqualification for the Nobel is not that he an inveterate liar, transparent faker and bungling schemer," Blumenthal argues. "It is that he meets other much more germane and dangerous criteria that were engraved for humankind epochs before the Peace Prize was ever conceived."

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Blumenthal continues, "Within mere months since reassuming office, Trump has become a harbinger across the globe of war, famine, disease and death…. Trump has called for the US to 'take over' and 'own' Gaza to turn it into a 'Riviera of the Middle East'…. The Trump White House has said it will 'not rule out' military action to seize Greenland, a semi-independent territory of Denmark, a NATO member."

Blumenthal notes that Trump "has repeatedly laid claim to the territory of the Panama Canal Zone and threatened to use military force to seize it" and "has also repeatedly laid claim to the entire nation of Canada, another NATO member, to be occupied by and added to the United States as a single state."

"Besides creating the conditions for famine," Blumenthal explains, "Trump's decision to terminate USAID could lead to more than 14 million additional preventable deaths globally by 2030, according to an authoritative July 2025 study in the British medical journal the Lancet — 'a staggering number of avoidable deaths'…. At home, Trump has eviscerated the National Institutes for Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and withheld $2.6bn from Harvard University in federal funds including for medical research on cancer and other diseases."

The Guardian columnist adds, "After an armed man with a semi-automatic rifle opposed to vaccines fired 150 rounds into the CDC headquarters in Atlanta and murdered a police officer, Trump said absolutely nothing. He has been a stalwart against any restriction on guns, which are almost without exception the weapons used in school massacres, mass shootings and violent crime."

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Sidney Blumenthal's full column for The Guardian is available at this link.

Katie Miller, wife of Stephen Miller — President Donald Trump's White House deputy chief of staff for policy — is now hosting a podcast. But the tone isn't that of a confrontational MAGA firebrand, which is how Stephen Miller is often described. Katie Miller, with her podcast, clearly isn't emulating the fiery, bombastic, in-your-face approach of Tomi Lahren or Fox News' Laura Ingraham. She's much more low-key.

In an article published on September 8, Salon's Amanda Marcotte emphasizes that Katie Miller clearly isn't trying to sound like her husband on her podcast — which, according to Marcotte, might be the point.

"It's technically called 'The Katie Miller Podcast,'" Marcotte argues, "but a better title would be 'The Banality of Evil.' The premise of every interview seems to be that just because the guests are far-right authoritarians, it doesn't mean they're interesting. Each episode is roughly an hour of scintillating content like which sorority Sen. Katie Britt, R-Ala., pledged in college, or how former ESPN host Sage Steele feels about wedding planning. Even her much-discussed premiere episode, which featured a 45-minute interview with Vice President JD Vance, was a big nothingburger. The biggest news that came out of it was that Stephen Miller eats a lot of mayonnaise."

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Marcotte continues, "The show was so bad that when I got to the fourth interview — in which we learn that Airbnb cofounder Joe Gebbia taught himself to code by designing his own websites — I was begging for the sweet release of death. But I was also puzzled. All Katie Miller's faux-pleasant, tedious small talk is just so different from her husband's persona of relentless top-volume aggrievement. He could never be on her show. His screeching bigotry would feel out of place in her pastel-colored dreamland, where nothing interesting ever happens."

The Salon journalist goes on to say, however, that Katie Miller and her MAGA allies might have made the podcast bland on purpose.

"Don't get me wrong," Marcotte writes. "Both their personal styles are horrible, just in very different ways. He comes across like he's murdering you with a hammer, while she will drive you into an early grave with whispery chit-chat about nothing. It's hard to believe they're married. That's probably the point: To create the illusion that Stephen Miller is a normal person. The unsubtle goal (of) 'The Katie Miller Podcast' is to 'humanize' its subjects with 'they’re just like you!' interviews."

Marcotte adds, "The underlying message is that fascists can't be so bad, if they also tell dad jokes or feel bad about eating too much chocolate. All that, in turn, serves the larger message of the show, which is that the Millers aren't sick monsters who hate America, because gosh — that Mrs. Stephen Miller just acts so darn normal. Or at least boring, which is what passes for normal in the twisted far-right mind. Another alternate title for the show: 'The Opiate of MAGA.'"

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Amanda Marcotte's full article for Salon is available at this link.