The Supreme Court’s decision on Monday marked another major victory for the Trump administration and another embarrassing defeat for the activist bench in California.
By staying Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong’s ruling against ICE immigration stops, the Court reaffirmed what should never have been in doubt: immigration enforcement is a federal responsibility, not a political experiment in sanctuary states.
California Governor Gavin Newsom once crowed that “justice has prevailed” when his ally’s ruling clipped ICE’s authority in Los Angeles. He won’t be repeating that line after this week’s sharp rebuke from the highest court in the land.
Sotomayor dissent on SCOTUS decision on ICE raids in LA: “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. Rather than stand idly by while our constitutional freedoms are lost, I…
— Jesse Rodriguez (@JesseRodriguez) September 8, 2025
The 6–3 split was predictable. Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson dissented, with Sotomayor taking the lead and delivering a sermon more fit for MSNBC’s primetime lineup than a Supreme Court chamber. She accused the majority of endorsing racial profiling, claiming Americans risk living in a country where anyone who “looks Latino, speaks Spanish, and appears to work a low-wage job” could be seized.
This, of course, misses the point entirely. As Justice Brett Kavanaugh explained in his concurrence, race alone cannot be the basis for reasonable suspicion, but it can be considered alongside other factors. That’s not new law — it’s decades of precedent. Sotomayor’s dissent wasn’t a legal argument; it was a campaign stump speech masquerading as jurisprudence.
And that is the real problem. The liberal justices increasingly treat their opinions as platforms to promote ideology rather than applying the law. Kagan at least dresses hers up in legal reasoning.
Sotomayor and Jackson dispense with the pretense altogether, turning dissents into political theater. The danger is not just their reasoning but the precedent it sets — judges assuming they can legislate from the bench whenever they dislike the outcome. That isn’t democracy. It’s judicial tyranny.
The majority got it right: if Congress wants to tighten restrictions on ICE, Congress can do so. Until then, ICE operates under federal law and executive authority. What a California district judge “feels” about immigration policy has no bearing on constitutional reality.
