MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
We begin this hour in Washington, where today, the U.S. Supreme Court cleared the way for the Trump administration to resume ethnic profiling tactics in rounding up undocumented immigrants for deportation. NPR legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg has been following this closely. She's with me now. Hey, Nina.
NINA TOTENBERG, BYLINE: Hi there.
KELLY: Tell me a bit more about the Supreme Court order today.
TOTENBERG: Well, this was another unsigned Supreme Court order delivered without explanation on the emergency docket. The Trump administration asked the justices to block a lower-court decision that barred ICE and other federal agents from rounding up immigrants based in large part on what the federal district court judge called, "blatant racial profiling." That's a quote. The Federal Appeals Court declined to block that decision while it considers the case, and so the administration then went to the Supreme Court, which agreed to intervene. This marks an astonishing 24th time in less than eight months that the administration has gone to the Supreme Court to override temporary lower-court orders, and in 21 of those cases, the court has given the administration what it wants. These just are numbers that are simply unheard of in the history of the court.
KELLY: Well, and in this particular case, what exactly had the lower court - the district court judge concluded in her ruling?
TOTENBERG: She said that there was a mountain of evidence that people were being rounded up by teams of masked and armed agents who arrest and detain people based on their brown skin, foreign accents or the places they work, like car washes and landscaping companies. Some of the people, including American citizens who were caught up in these sweeps, challenged these practices in court. One of them, for instance, was a U.S. citizen born in Los Angeles, who was stopped while working on his car outside his home. The incident was captured on video, showing the agent slamming the guy up against a metal gate, and other agents twisting the guy's arm and grabbing his phone. The judge found that this kind of conduct was a clear violation of the Constitution's ban on search and seizures of individuals without any prior justifying evidence.
KELLY: OK. So that's the background. That is what the Supreme Court has waded into. And what exactly did the court's conservatives do?
TOTENBERG: Well, without explanation, they allowed the government to reinstate its practices, at least for now. One justice, Brett Kavanaugh, wrote a concurring opinion seeking to explain the court's - or at least his - justification. Particularly in this case, he said, given the millions of individuals illegally in the United States, the interests of the individuals who are illegally in the country in avoiding being stopped for questioning is ultimately an interest in evading the law. That's not an especially weighty legal interest, he wrote.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, writing for the court's three liberal justices, blasted Kavanaugh and the court's other conservatives for parachuting into the case at an early stage, calling the court's action another grave misuse of the emergency docket. Sotomayor said, we should not have to live in a country where the government can seize anyone who looks Latino, speaks Spanish and appears to work at a low-wage job.
KELLY: Let me briefly move you, Nina, onto another action taken today. This was by the Chief Justice John Roberts. He is temporarily barring lower courts from reinstating the last remaining Democratic member of the FTC, the Federal Trade Commission. Where are we on this one?
TOTENBERG: This is only a so-called administrative stay (ph) - a pause to allow time for the other side to file briefs. But it's yet another strong indication that the court's conservatives are aiming to reverse a nearly century-old decision barring presidents from firing independent agency commissioners, except for misconduct.
KELLY: OK.
TOTENBERG: And if the administration prevails in this case, take a look at RFK Jr. and his firings of medical experts as a forecast of things to come.
KELLY: NPR's Nina Totenberg, thanks.
TOTENBERG: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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