Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent to SCOTUS’ latest ruling allowing racial profiling to detain migrants earned her a standing ovation from Stephen Colbert’s Late Show audience on Tuesday night.
The 6-3 decision overturned a lower court ruling that blocked ICE from racially profiling Latinos. Colbert shared Sotomayor’s dissent aloud during her appearance on the show.
“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,” Colbert read aloud. “Rather than stand idly by while our constitutional freedoms are lost, I dissent.”
The audience clapped and then jumped to their feet in support of the scathing remarks.
Sotomayor told Colbert earlier in the show that Donald Trump’s power grabs through the Supreme Court’s emergency docket decisions are because “success breeds new attempts.” She explained, “And to the extent that we have altered the natural course of history by granting more consideration of emergency dockets of the emergency cases, we invite more of them. Significantly more.”
In the case of the Trump administration’s efforts to detain at least 3,000 migrants a day and relying on visual markers to obtain said quota, Sotomayor said the other Justices “claim” ICE officers are identifying suspected “illegal aliens” by more than just race.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh argued in his concurrence that “Apparent ethnicity alone cannot furnish reasonable suspicion; under this Court’s case law regarding immigration stops, however, it can be a ‘relevant factor’ when considered along with other salient factors.”
“Countless people in the Los Angeles area have been grabbed, thrown to the ground, and handcuffed simply because of their looks, their accents, and the fact they make a living by doing manual labor,” Sotomayor also wrote in her remarks on the ruling.
“I didn’t agree with them, but they claimed there was more than those two factors, being Latino and speaking Spanish,” Sotomayor told Colbert Tuesday. “I don’t think the third adds much to the equation, but they do. They say it’s because they are working in low-wage jobs.”
Colbert clarified, “People in low-wage jobs have fewer protections.”
Sotomayor, clearly still not buying it, “That’s the claim.”
Colbert pressed, “Well, that’s the upshot of it, isn’t it?”
Sotomayor stopped him, “Let’s not go any further.”
