Whose Common Sense?
On September 8, 2025, in the case of Noem v. Vazquez Perdomo, the Supreme Court signaled its support for ICE’s continued use of racial profiling in immigration policing. By staying a lower court’s restraining order, the Court allowed agents once again to stop and arrest people based on how they look, the language they speak, where they live, and the kind of work they do. The closest the Court came to providing reasons for its intervention came in the form of a non-precedential concurrence authored by Justice Kavanaugh. In it, “common sense” is doing the heavy lifting, just as it has in the Court’s immigration policing jurisprudence for decades, at the expense of facts, evidence, and individual rights.
