When I was a young UCLA constitutional major, we learned that the constitution is more than just the parchment behind glass: it is an active promise, fragile and fierce, designed to protect the people when power is too much.
But on Monday morning, the Supreme Court taught me something new: these promises can disappear in the hands of some kind of court without debate, or even without signatures.
In Noem vs. Vasquez Perdomo, most justices expressed quiet blessings for the immigrant attacks in Los Angeles targeting people looking at Latinos, speaking Spanish and building the country’s work, but never enough to pay enough to live.
The decision fell without a comprehensive briefing. No verbal debate. There is rich records without evidence. Just the late summer shadows of the marble highlands.
The ruling allows federal agents to resume attacks in Los Angeles and surrounding counties – in the attacks where people without arrest warrants were caught, there is no specific suspicion of the cause. Just skin tone, language and old-fashioned hands.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor refused to let it pass without being challenged. “We don’t have to live in a country where the government can grab any seemingly Latino, speak Spanish and seem to be working in low-wage jobs,” she wrote. “I disagree, rather than doing nothing when our constitutional freedom is lost.”
Her objection is more than just objection. This is a warning.
What makes this moment shocking is not only the decision, but how it comes. The court used the so-called emergency case – a channel that had been reserved for real crises such as wartime bans or stopped imminent executions. No argument was heard. There is no summary debate. No facts are valued in the sun. This is not ordinary.
Emergency case files have become the back door of the court, where the huge consequences of the decisions are unsigned, unexplained and final. Transformative rulings can now bypass the deliberation process of our democracy in memory.
California knows these patterns very well. We have a history of shadows: the Japanese detention order that was once signed here, and now the ice attacks are resumed here. Los Angeles, its murals and multi-generational families, have become wills of fear of politics.
Earlier in Noem vs. Vasquez Perdomo, the District Court found that ICE had car washes, bus stops and farms based solely on appearance and location. There is no evidence of crime. No warrants. It’s just the intersection of poverty, race and language.
This is exactly what the forbidden Fourth Amendment behavior – “unreasonable searches and seizures”. However, the Supreme Court now says: If they are brown, catch them.
Most people don’t offer any reason. Only Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote a brief consent, which was necessary to avoid “interrupting” the Federal Immigration Agency’s decision.
destroy? The Constitution itself is to destroy – strictly brakes on unrestricted forces. The divestment of protection from the entire community is to declare the right conditions.
What’s next? Language-based monitoring? Algorithm’s workplace pause? Do you suspect it is normalized into policy?
Noem and Vasquez said constitutional rights are now succumb to immigration enforcement. This should scare every American because once one loses equal protection from the law, others will follow it.
Sotomayor’s objection may not carry the power of the law, but it brings something older, a moral memory of the Constitution that is often betrayed in silence. In her words, we hear the echo of Justice John Marshall Harlan in Plessy and Ferguson, standing alone when the court majority allowed the racist charm to be “separate but equal.”
Back in 1896, Harlan wrote: “The Constitution is color blindness.”
It must also be language blind, stress-blind, poverty-blind, or not justice at all.
If the Constitution no longer represents millions of Spanish-speaking brown workers, it will no longer speak for anyone.
We cannot satisfy this silence in silence. We must answer – not in whispers, but in the sounds of fields and factories, car washes and classrooms, border towns and town halls. Refusing to forget the voice of justice, refusing to let the country forget the purpose of its constitution.
Dean Florez is a former California Senate Majority Leader who represents part of the Central Valley.
