California Attorney General Rob Bonta provided a prompt reaction to the Supreme Court’s ruling on Monday, which allows ICE agents to use race, job, language, and location to select people for detention.
Talking to reporters in downtown Los Angeles, Bonta said he’s disappointed with the ruling.
“This is an emergency petition,” he said. “The U.S. Supreme Court could have stayed out of it and allowed the lower court proceedings to continue, but they decided that they wanted to weigh in because it's the emergency docket.”
Bonta added that because this is the Supreme Court, his office can't do anything.
“We will observe what the parties to the litigation decide to do in court, and should we have a role that we think is helpful and appropriate as an amicus, we will consider that, certainly,” he said.
The decision was 6-3. While it’s unclear which justices voted which way, Politico reported that Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote an opinion that was in support of the decision. Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote the dissenting opinion and voted in the minority.
“She says we ought not live in a government or in a nation where the government can seize you because you appear Latino, because you speak Spanish, or because you appear to have a low-wage job, and I couldn't agree more,” Bonta said.
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In a statement, Mayor Karen Bass called the decision “an attack on every person in every city in this country.”
“Today’s ruling is not only dangerous – it’s un-American and threatens the fabric of personal freedom in the United States of America,” she said.
In his statement, Gov. Gavin Newsom wrote that "Trump’s hand-picked Supreme Court majority just became the Grand Marshal for a parade of racial terror in Los Angeles.”
“This isn’t about enforcing immigration laws — it’s about targeting Latinos and anyone who doesn’t look or sound like Stephen Miller’s idea of an American, including U.S. citizens and children, to deliberately harm California’s families and small businesses,” he continued.
Meanwhile, Gregory Bovino, the chief patrol agent at Customs and Border Protection, criticized the New York Times’ reporting on the decision on X, writing that the stops are lawful and “based on a hundred years of case law and Border Patrol expertise.”
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