Unlike immigrants, most Black Americans post-slavery never faced the threat of mass deportation (although that was contemplated, in a fashion, in the various Back to Africa movements), so they were ostracized from “regular” society through segregation. It helps to remember that such ostracizing was also sanctioned by the Supreme Court in other momentous rulings such as the Dred Scott decision and Plessy v. Ferguson that have remained notorious stains on our history and ideals. It’s not hard to imagine that Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo will come to be viewed (hopefully) as the same kind of disgrace.

In the modern age, the Roberts court has sought to seriously weaken or overturn the few attempts at racial equality made in the 1960s, such as the Voting Rights Act. The message of “you don’t belong” has been clear all along despite the modern right-wing argument that racial protections aren’t needed because, according to that argument, racism is no longer a thing. Racial progress has reached an endpoint.

What is truly momentous about the high court’s decision is that the fig leaf of that argument is gone, and the overt racism of the past is, in the era of Trump, back in full judicial view. Gone also is the gravity and deliberation that we used to accord such a hugely impactful case that touches on so many principles not just of law but of national identity and character — think Brown v. Board of Education. Instead of being preceded by public debate and deliberation, this one was expedited by the Supreme Court’s “shadow docket” without thorough consideration or fully reasoned opinions. 

While Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote a brief concurrence, it ignored grave concerns about the basic freedoms of Latino citizens and noncitizens alike being shredded by immigration agents as mere inconveniences to be accepted as part of the business of enforcing the law. Ironically, and very tellingly, Kavanaugh cited a horrific 1983 incident of racial profiling of a Black man in Los Angeles to make his case for concurrence.

This decision is best seen as another step in what has become a steady march toward solidifying the power of white Americans to determine the fate of everybody else, however and whenever they like. It’s revealing how many times Kavanaugh’s summary used the word “illegal” to describe Latino immigrants, because that word signifies something much deeper than expired or missing paperwork: It means illegitimate. It means Latino-ness is itself the problem in much the same way blackness has always been the problem. It doesn’t belong.

It’s a rude awakening for Latinos who, unlike most Black people, have also benefited at various times from white America’s affinity for the narrative of the hardworking, up-by-the-bootstraps immigrant. That idea is daily life in Southern California, where so many people doing the hardest, lowest-paid and most thankless jobs, from farmworkers and landscapers to construction and fast-food workers, are from Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala and other parts of Latin America. But Black and Latino communities share some of the same troubling statistical realities shaped by their lower-caste status in American society, including overrepresentation in poverty, incarceration and (surprise!) racial profiling.

To Trump and his acolytes, however, both Black and brown people are corroding the mythologized “real America.” It’s no accident that the escalating war on immigrants coincides with the escalating war on big cities like L.A., Washington, D.C. and Chicago that are led by Black mayors and substantially populated by Black people and Latino immigrants. It can all be seen as an extension of Trump’s foundational war on diversity, equity and inclusion that targets Black folks first and foremost. Anti-Latino-ness is not exactly anti-blackness, but they’re getting closer.

In that context, it’s hard to see the  Supreme Court’s Trump-friendly ruling as anything other than a “yes, and” to the president’s ongoing effort to bully California into becoming a different place, to turn its famed openness into a permanent site of incursion and abuse by federal agents and troops who increasingly answer only to Trump. It won’t work. While the state has its own terrible history of antiblackness and anti-immigration (including passing its own Fugitive Slave Act and the ill-fated Proposition 187 and related efforts to scapegoat immigrants in the 1990s), it also remains a beacon in the country for self-invention and for realizing still-powerful American ideals of prosperity, inclusion and equity. 

Southern California’s dense and diverse economy has created a wealth of opportunities that have historically attracted people from everywhere, including from the American South and from south of the border. Diversity is not just a fact of life here, it’s a core strength. It’s what we do and who we are. Not just what we look like.