Latina/os and Criminal and Immigration Law Enforcement

Summary

Racialization in American immigration policy is not unique to the Trump Administration. One of the first immigration laws to utilize racial profiling was the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act which prohibited Chinese laborers from entering the country and excluded those who had already settled in the U.S. from citizenship, classifying them as "permanent aliens." Later, the Ku Klux Klan utilized this language—alien—to represent those they considered outsiders to their vision of a white America: Black people and Catholic and Jewish immigrants. This anti-immigrant agenda, embodied by their slogan "America First," led to the passage of the 1924 Immigration Act that established the Border Patrol. Both the Chinese Exclusion Act and the Immigration Act of 1924, created a category of "illegal alien," people who broke the law to get into the country, often because there was no legal avenue to immigrate.

President Trump’s policies targeting illegal aliens often equate illegal immigration with Latinx people. This fear of illegal immigrants from Mexico and Central America that prompted the creation of the Border Patrol in 1924 continued to influence immigration policy in the U.S. During the 1930s, one million Mexican immigrants and Mexican-Americans were repatriated to Mexico by state and local governments. A 1954 federal program named Operation Wetback utilized military-style roundups to detain and deport as many as one million Mexican and Mexican-American laborers. During the Republican presidential debate in 2015, then-presidential candidate Trump vowed to resurrect Operation Wetback.

The creation of the Border Patrol and subsequent federal laws and projects helped create the idea that people of Mexican ancestry were not U.S. citizens. This concept of Mexican perpetual foreignness led to racial profiling in immigration enforcement. In U.S. v. Brignoni-Ponce (1975), the Supreme Court found that immigration stops based solely on appearance of race or ethnicity were a violation of the 4th Amendment. In 2025, Supreme Court Justice Kavanaugh wrote in his concurring opinion in Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo that "apparent ethnicity alone cannot furnish reasonable suspicion; under this Court’s case law regarding immigration stops, however, it can be a 'relevant factor' when considered along with other salient factors." Kavanaugh continued that legal immigrants and U.S. citizens racially profiled and stopped by immigration "may promptly go free after making clear to the immigration officers that they are U.S. citizens or otherwise legally in the United States." Justice Sotomayor, the first and only Latinx Justice on the Supreme Court delivered a dissent. "We should not have to live in a country where the Government can seize anyone who looks Latino, speaks Spanish, and appears to work a low wage job. Rather than stand idly by while our constitutional freedoms are lost, I dissent."

Racialization has long been a part of U.S. immigration policy, and Latinx immigrants have been the targets of these policies since the 1930s.

Suggested Reading

Johnson, Kevin R. and Bernard Trujillo. Immigration Law and the U.S.–Mexico Border: ¿Sí se puede? University of Arizona Press, 2011.