How have courts treated claims of racial profiling in immigration stops after the Supreme Court’s 2025 orders?
Executive summary
The Supreme Court’s September 2025 emergency order paused a federal court’s restraining order that had barred ICE and DHS from using apparent race, language, workplace, or location as bases for immigration stops in Los Angeles, a move lower courts had called likely unlawful [1] [2]. Since that shadow‑docket intervention, courts have been split in tone: lower courts continue to entertain constitutional challenges and seek injunctions, while the Supreme Court’s brief stay—and its reliance on longstanding immigration‑enforcement precedents—has signaled judicial deference to executive enforcement choices and narrowed immediate remedies against alleged racial profiling [3] [4].
1. The lower courts found profiling likely unlawful before the Supreme Court intervened
Federal judges in Los Angeles and the Ninth Circuit had concluded that the government’s “four‑factor” stops—based on apparent race or ethnicity, Spanish language use, certain workplaces, and location—were likely to violate constitutional protections and enjoined the practices, findings rooted in factual findings about how those stops were carried out [5] [2] [3]. Those district‑court findings became the immediate target of the government’s emergency appeal that landed on the Supreme Court’s shadow docket [3].
2. The Supreme Court’s 2025 emergency order altered immediate judicial relief without a full precedential ruling
The high court’s stay lifted the lower‑court restraining order, allowing DHS and ICE to resume the contested tactics while litigation continues; the order was issued as an emergency procedural decision rather than a full, signed opinion, a procedural posture that leaves many legal questions unresolved and gives agencies immediate operational leeway [3] [6]. Commentators and civil‑liberties groups characterize that stay as effectively green‑lighting profiling in practice, because officers and the public see an authoritative halt to the injunction even if the underlying case remains adjudicated below [7] [6].
3. Subsequent lower‑court proceedings have continued to press constitutional claims
Plaintiffs and advocacy groups did not abandon the case after the Supreme Court’s order; they continued to seek preliminary relief and to litigate Fourth and equal‑protection claims in the district court and the Ninth Circuit, arguing that the government’s own record showed stops based solely on the enumerated factors [4] [3]. The litigation posture therefore is one of competing timelines: immediate enforcement enabled by the Supreme Court’s stay versus continuing adversarial fact‑finding and constitutional adjudication in the lower courts [1] [4].
4. Supreme Court rhetoric and precedent point to deference for immigration enforcement
When the Supreme Court intervened, it leaned on decades of immigration‑law precedent that afford leeway to immigration officers’ border‑and‑immigration‑adjacent powers—doctrines that historically treated immigration enforcement differently than ordinary policing and have limited exclusionary remedies in immigration contexts—encouraging lower judicial restraint in setting broad restraints on enforcement priorities [3] [8]. Legal scholars warn that this doctrinal posture reduces the practical deterrents against discriminatory stops because immigration proceedings and remedies differ from criminal‑law protections like the exclusionary rule [8].
5. Courts’ treatment is contested and politicized; advocacy groups and professional bodies press counterarguments
Civil‑rights and immigrant‑rights groups, several bar associations, and university experts have publicly framed the Supreme Court’s procedural order as authorizing racial and ethnic profiling and have urged courts to restore injunctions and enforce constitutional safeguards, while DHS framed the stay as vindication of its public‑safety mission—illustrating that subsequent judicial treatment is happening in a highly politicized environment where competing institutional agendas shape litigation strategies [7] [9] [10]. The American Bar Association and multiple legal clinics have urged continued court scrutiny and emphasized due process concerns even as the high court’s action constrained immediate judicial relief [10].
6. Bottom line: courts have not uniformly blessed profiling, but the Supreme Court’s 2025 order limited lower‑court protections in practice
Post‑order, lower courts remain the battleground for constitutional claims and factual findings about discriminatory practice, yet the Supreme Court’s emergency stay—issued without a full, reasoned opinion—has curtailed the immediate protective power of injunctions and signaled institutional deference to immigration enforcement, leaving plaintiffs dependent on protracted litigation to secure durable limits on profiling [3] [4]. Where the record shows stops based principally on race or language, plaintiffs continue to press challenges; the decisive question now is whether full briefing and a merits decision will restore or further erode judicial checks against racially discriminatory immigration stops [1] [2].