There are specific moments
— and right now, to be honest they’re coming too frequently
— where America crosses a once unthinkable bright line,
moments that are worth noticing and calling out.

This week’s Chicago raid was surely one of those.

There is no warrant any judge could give
— or at least, in theory, that any reasonable judge would ever sign!
— that gives federal authorities the right to break down the doors of every apartment in a building in search of undocumented immigrants.

That is almost exactly the definition of the so-called “general warrants”
or “writs of assistance”
that the British used against US colonists that helped spur the Revolution
— warrants then very specifically outlawed by the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution.

It's no surprise that ICE has been evasive about the legal basis for its Monday raid thus far:
They surely don’t have one
— and the fact that they feel this unhinged and can act so aggressively without possible consequence is astounding.

In part, though, the behavior by ICE is the natural and entirely foreseeable consequence of the crazy legal precedents set up by John Roberts and the Supreme Court earlier this fall in the case
🔥"Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo",
which explicitly allowed ICE to racially profile brown people on the streets of America.

That Supreme Court decision laid bare the growing divide on the court
and the Republican majority that seems set on enabling an authoritarian and inhumane regime.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor laid out the stakes and the very obvious downstream impact of a ruling that explicitly allowed racial profiling by immigration authorities:

“We should not have to live in a country where the Government can seize anyone who looks Latino,
speaks Spanish, and appears to work in a low wage job,” she wrote.

“The Constitution does not permit the creation of such a second-class citizenship status.”
And yet in its ruling, John Roberts’ Court did just that
— switching the national presumption of innocence such that any non-white person on America’s streets now is, in the eyes of the Supreme Court and federal officers,
presumed guilty of being an illegal immigrant unless and until he or she can prove to the officers’ satisfaction otherwise.

(It matters, too, by the way that from what we’ve seen so far,
there’s no agreed-upon way to prove your citizenship to those federal officers:
We’ve even seen ICE reject the so-called gold standard “Real IDs”
as sufficient for proving citizenship, after a years-long campaign by the government to force states to upgrade to Real IDs precisely in order to prove citizenship.)

Brett Kavanaugh, though, beclowned himself with a concurring opinionthat laid out how he imagined friendly consensual encounters with immigration officers went on America’s streets:

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