The supreme court interprets the laws, including the constitution, and they've decided that being brown is sufficient reasonability.

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estearum 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

Nope they didn't decide that. It's actually even worse!

A lot of Americans have the impression that SCOTUS keeps deciding in the administration's favor, but this is not true.

SCOTUS is saying: "We're not going to hear this case right now, but we likely will in the future. In the meantime, we are going to overturn the lower court who did actually hear the case and allow the administration to continue its actions. No, we will not explain we think the lower court got wrong."

Increasingly these SCOTUS orders totally unexplained which is a blatant violation of their judicial obligations, and they are frequently unsigned by the majority (conservative) Justices. Presumably because they don't want their names written on papers that they know will be understood by future generations to be totally indefensible.

SCOTUS has proven itself functionally incapable of fulfilling its Constitutional duties and has proven that we need a lot more Justices. If you don't have the time to hear the cases we need you to hear, then the court needs to be scaled up and we can pick random panels to hear different cases.

Nothing to do with policy disagreements (how would any American even know if they had a policy disagreement with an unexplained, unsigned SCOTUS order?) – we just need courts that can decide on things that are important to our country.

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potato3732842 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Frankly it's a miracle it took this long to be a problem IMO.

The supreme court over the years has watered down constitutional protections against government enforcement upon individuals massively because doing so was necessary to empower the government to enforce speeding tickets, financial regulation, environmental regulation, chase bootleggers, etc, etc, with it's power only constrained in practice by political optics.

So now here we are, in a situation where the government is doing what it always does, levying what's essentially a criminal punishment (incarceration in this case, typically fines historically) in a case where allegedly no crime has been committed, and then give the accused only kangaroo court administrative process because it's not a crime, but now it's doing it at scale, flagrantly, loudly and against the political will of some of the locations it's doing it in.

There are a lot of bricks in this road to hell and someone somewhere was issuing a warning as each one was laid. Should have listened.

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estearum 5 days ago | parent [-]

What are you talking about?

This was a problem in 2012 and SCOTUS ruled unambiguously in Arizona vs United States that we cannot stop people based solely on their outward "apparent" immigration status. In SCOTUS's own words, "the usual predicate for an arrest is absent" and being merely "suspected of being removable... does not authorize an arrest."

"As a general rule, it is not a crime for a removable alien to remain present in the United States. See INS v. Lopez-Mendoza, 468 U.S. 1032, 1038 (1984). If the police stop someone based on nothing more than possible removability, the usual predicate for an arrest is absent. When an alien is suspected of being removable, a federal official issues an administrative document called a Notice to Appear. See 8 U. S. C. §1229(a); 8 CFR §239.1(a) (2012).

The form does not authorize an arrest."

This is a MAGA and Heritage Foundation-driven reversal of VERY recently settled law. Absolutely not business as usual.

https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/567/387/#tab-opi...

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potato3732842 5 days ago | parent [-]

I'm not even debating the legality of the stop. It doesn't matter. Whether or not the stop is legit the whole system from there on is a kangaroo court rife with rights violations as well. That's the real problem here. Hair splitting over the specific reason for a stop is a distraction. Even if you fix it it won't change much. Whether or not they can make the stop doesn't really matter. They'll find other ways to force people to produce their papers.

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estearum 5 days ago | parent [-]

It literally changes whether brown-ish Americans can go about their day without being thrown on the ground in zipties or not.

> They'll find other ways to force people to produce their papers

Okay, so make them find other, increasingly illegal ways so they can be held accountable at a future date. Not quasi-blessed by SCOTUS's delay tactics.

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potato3732842 5 days ago | parent [-]

Tell that to all the black new yorkers who had their guns and/or weed stolen by the government during the stop and frisk era.

Having the ability to stop people isn't worth much if you don't have the unaccountable bureaucracy that can unilaterally doll out whatever punishment it wants.

The usefulness of these sort of fishing exercises regardless of what kind of violation is being gone after is wholly predicated on the upstream system denying these people their rights. If enforcement bureaucracies had to give everyone subject to "serious punishment" (whatever we agree that is, incarceration likely fits it) real rights, follow real protocols involving warrants, evidince, etc, etc. and potentially drag them in front of a jury then you wouldn't have any of this.

And it's not just limited to ICE. Pretty much every other law (and I don't just mean criminal, civil too) enforcement excess evaporates overnight if people get full protection afforded by their rights after law enforcement interacts with them.

Now, you could argue that we should instead impose the constraints on law enforcement contact and then all these unaccountable systems that violate people's rights will be fine because the enforcers won't be shoving innocent people into them, but looking at the last ~50yr of executive branch (not just feds, states very much too) history, that's basically what we've done and it clearly hasn't worked.

This isn't a brown people problem. This is a bigger fundamental problem with how we've architected law (once again, not just criminal) enforcement in this country. The brown people are just the newsworthy implementation at this particular minute.

	▲	estearum 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		You mean the policy that was aggressively fought by the very same people fighting this policy? Who exactly do you think you're arguing against here? Are you looking for a "good job potato3732842 for being mad about Stop and Frisk previously," and unless you get that you're going to hem and haw about how awful a nationwide expansion of a far more aggressive variant with far worse consequences at orders of magnitude larger scale of a similar policy is? > enforcement excess evaporates overnight if people get full protection afforded by their rights after law enforcement interacts with them. Yeah, duh. That's why people are here advocating for people to retain their rights and for law enforcement to be held accountable. If your argument is that the current policy is just another point on the same continuum as many others: yes, obviously that's true. If your argument is that this means it's somehow equivalent to other points on the same continuum: no, obviously it's not. If your argument is instead that this is a different point on the same continuum, but because people weren't upset about Point A they have no justification to be upset (or even more upset) about Point B: that's ridiculous.