MSNBC host torches Supreme Court for 'treating 4th Amendment as negotiable'

In its 6-3 ruling in Vasquez Perdomo v. Noem handed down on Monday, September 8, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the way in which the Trump Administration is conducting U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids. A federal court judge in Los Angeles and the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals had ruled that the raids amounted to illegal racial profiling, but the High Court's six GOP-appointed justices disagreed. The three dissenters, meanwhile, were Democratic appointees: Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Ketanji Brown Jackson and Elena Kagan.

Critics of the Vasquez Perdomo v. Noem ruling range from the American Immigration Council to the America Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to MSNBC host Ali Velshi, who described the decision as anti-4th Amendment during a scathing commentary on Saturday morning, September 13.

The decision's implications, Velshi warned, go way beyond immigration policy and ICE raids and treat the U.S. Constitution's 4th Amendment as expendable. Ratified in 1791 as part of the Bill of Rights, the 4th Amendment protects against unreasonable search and seizure.

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"ICE agents now have the High Court's blessing to racially profile people during immigration sweeps in Los Angeles," Velshi warned. "They're allowed to stop people based solely on their apparent race or ethnicity, language or accent, the type of work they do, where they do it. The 4th Amendment requires reasonable suspicion before anyone, any person, citizen or not, documented or not, can be stopped by law enforcement. The law is not allowed to just guess at that — that because of how you look or speak, or where you live and work, that you might have committed a crime."

Velshi continues, "Equal protection forbids race as a factor. The lower courts enforced that principle; the Supreme Court just erased it. And perhaps the most outrageous part: the conservative majority in the Supreme Court issued their decision using the so-called shadow docket, where the Court rules on Trump Administration emergency motions without oral arguments or explanation — no hearing, no accountability, just judicial fiat handed down in the dark."

However, the MSNBC host, who is originally from Canada, stressed that "this ruling isn't about immigration" and has "broader implications."

"It tells millions of Americans that your protection from unreasonable search and seizure depends on whether the government decides you look like you belong, which is not what the Constitution's Framers envisioned, I hope — certainly not democracy as we have come to know it in this country," Velshi told viewers. "Consider Brian Gavidia, a U.S. citizen from East Los Angeles — who voted for (Donald) Trump, by the way…. He says federal agents shoved him against a fence, twisted his arm, and demanded to know which hospital he was born in. All because he looked Latino. This is the new normal that the Court has sanctioned."

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Velshi attacked Justice Brett Kavanaugh's reasoning in Vasquez Perdomo v. Noem as "hollow," stressing, "Rights are not conditional favors granted after innocence is proven — they are the shield against arbitrary suspicion in the first place. Kavanaugh's distorted logic seems to suggest that if you're brown, you're guilty of an immigration violation until you're proven innocent…. That's not just sloppy logic, it's dangerous….. It's not that the conservative justices don't understand the Constitution; it's that they don't care…. Once the 4th Amendment is treated as negotiable for one group — Latino communities, brown people, in this case — it becomes weaker for all of us."