They couldn't even be bothered to write an opinion. The Supreme Court's six right-wing Trumpers issued a summary opinion staying a district court order, which had been upheld by the Court of Appeals, prohibiting "roving patrols" of ICE agents from stopping and seizing people based on their race and ethnicity.

That's right: The same Supreme Court that says it's unconstitutional to take race into account in providing educational and employment opportunities to minorities says it's just fine to use race as a factor for detaining them. Heads you lose, tails you lose.

At least give Brett Kavanaugh credit for writing a concurrence, trying to explain the inexplicable. It doesn't work, but how could it? Racial profiling makes statistical sense; it's just not supposed to be how we do things.

According to Kavanaugh, "Immigration officers 'may briefly detain' an individual 'for questioning' if they have 'a reasonable suspicion, based on specific articulable facts, that the person being questioned ... is an alien illegally in the United States.'"

He said such stops are reasonable and legal based on the "totality of the circumstances. Here, those circumstances include: that there is an extremely high number and percentage of illegal immigrants in the Los Angeles area; that those individuals tend to gather in certain locations to seek daily work; that those individuals often work in certain kinds of jobs, such as day labor, landscaping, agriculture, and construction, that do not require paperwork and are therefore especially attractive to illegal immigrants; and that many of those illegally in the Los Angeles area come from Mexico or Central America and do not speak much English."

Those were exactly the same factors — race, ethnicity, the Home Depot parking lot, speaking Spanish — that the district judge and the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals said agents may not use as a basis for stopping someone for questioning. You need targeted suspicion based on individualized factors, not stereotypes.

The court's three remaining liberals dissented. Justice Sonia Sotomayor called the decision "yet another grave misuse of our emergency docket. 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 dissent."

Justice Sotomayor is right. "The Government ... has all but declared that all Latinos, U.S. citizens or not, who work low wage jobs are fair game to be seized at any time, taken away from work, and held until they provide proof of their legal status to the agents' satisfaction," she wrote. "Immigration agents are not conducting 'brief stops for questioning,' as the concurrence would like to believe. They are seizing people using firearms, physical violence, and warehouse detentions," she wrote. "Nor are undocumented immigrants the only ones harmed by the Government's conduct. United States citizens are also being seized, taken from their jobs, and prevented from working to support themselves and their families."

Roving patrols of masked ICE agents pouring out of rental trucks to chase people down the streets of Hispanic neighborhoods? Is this really what people were voting for when they cheered Trump's plans to deport rapists and murderers? Clearing the Home Depot parking lots instead? This is not a targeted approach. It is an effort to meet an artificial, political goal, through the sort of race-based policing that we, in other contexts, have rightly branded as unconstitutional. Why not here?

To find out more about Susan Estrich and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

Photo credit: Molly Hutson at Unsplash