Normally, when the federal government is credibly accused of violating the Bill of Rights, a government lawyer will tell a federal judge that the alleged misconduct never happened. No way, your honor, the lawyer will protest. No agent of this government ever did anything like that!
But Noem v. Perdomo is not a normal case. Instead of disavowing the apparently unconstitutional behavior at its core, the Trump administration is openly embracing that behavior and urging the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court to do the same. It is the rare case in which both the government and its opponents agree that federal agents behaved in a specific way; the two sides only disagree about whether the specific behavior should count as good or bad.
The specific behavior at issue here is racial profiling. Multiple U.S. citizens have alleged that they were illegally seized by federal immigration agents in Los Angeles based solely on unlawful factors such as their "apparent race or ethnicity," or the fact that they were "speaking Spanish or speaking English with an accent."
