The Cost of a Hunch

On September 8, 2025, the Supreme Court cleared the way for immigration agents to stop people based on how they look.

The case was Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo. In a 6–3 order, the Court lifted a lower-court ruling that had barred agents from stopping people based solely on four things:

Their apparent race or ethnicity
Whether they spoke Spanish, or English with an accent
The type of place they were found — a car wash, a bus stop, a day-labor corner
The kind of work they appeared to do

Six justices granted it: Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett. They did it on the "shadow docket" — an emergency order with no full opinion and no signatures. Only Justice Kavanaugh explained himself, writing that apparent ethnicity can't justify a stop by itself but may count as a "relevant factor."

Three justices dissented, and put their names to it: Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

Strip away the language and the standard is simple. Agents may stop people based on how they look, the language they speak, where they stand, and the work they seem to do.

That is not evidence. It is a hunch given legal cover.

We pay for what happens next

Every immigration stop is bought with public money — the agents, the vehicles, the detention beds, the flights. When we ask whether a dollar is spent well, enforcement should face the same question as everything else: what are we getting for it?

In the last week, what that money bought includes two dead men who were not the people ICE set out to arrest.

The predictable part

Lower the bar for who gets stopped, and you raise the number of stops. Raise the number of stops, and you raise the number that go wrong.

We did not have to guess how that would go. We can now count.

Two men, one week

July 7, Houston. Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, 52, was shot and killed by an ICE officer during a vehicle stop. He was on his way to a job building homes. He had no criminal record. According to Rep. Sylvia Garcia, he was not the target of the operation. The agents were not wearing body cameras.

July 13, Biddeford, Maine. Joan Sebastian Guerrero, 26, a Colombian national authorized to work in the United States, was shot and killed by an ICE agent. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin told Senator Angus King the man was not the target of the arrest warrant.

Neither man was who ICE went out to arrest. Both are dead anyway.

The Maine shooting is at least the ninth death tied to federal immigration enforcement since the crackdown intensified.

What it costs

The dollar cost of this system is easy to look up:

What it buys	Cost
Detaining one person	~$155 / day
Deporting one person	~$14,000

The other cost doesn't fit in the table.

We are spending public money to stop more people on thinner justification. The return is not more safety. It is more stops, more mistakes, and — twice in one week — a body.

Compared to what?

If any other program cost this much, ran on a hunch, and killed innocent people while missing its own targets, we would call it a failed program and cut it. Enforcement should not get an exemption because it carries a badge.

You do not have to settle the entire immigration debate to see the problem. You only have to follow the money and look at what it bought.

It is working as intended

It would be generous to call this a malfunction. It isn't.

Look at the standard the six justices approved. The very first factor is apparent race or ethnicity. Add the others — speaking Spanish, standing at a day-labor site, working a manual trade — and the "reasonable suspicion" test is, in plain terms, a description of a Latino working man. Race is not a side effect of the net. It is the trigger.

An administration that actually wanted to remove criminals would tighten its criteria after killing a work-authorized man who was not even the target. This one defends the criteria and keeps going.

That tells you what the goal is. The goal is not to catch criminals. The wide net, the thin justification, the acceptable body count — all of it points one direction: remove as many brown people as possible, and treat the lawful ones caught in the sweep as an acceptable cost.

When the mistakes only ever run one way, they are not mistakes. They are the design.

This is bigger than one ruling

A court is supposed to be a check. It is the branch with no army and no budget of its own — its only job is to hold the line on the law when the other branches push past it.

This court did the opposite. It removed a check. It took a lower judge's effort to stop race-based stops and swept it aside, handing the executive more room to act, not less.

And it did it in the dark. No full opinion. No signatures. An emergency order issued on the shadow docket, where the most consequential questions increasingly get decided with the least explanation. Six justices reshaped how millions of people can be stopped on American streets, and only one of them was willing to say why.

That is not an isolated slip. It is a pattern — a court that reaches for power quietly, sides with the strong over the vulnerable, and answers to no one. Its members are appointed for life. They cannot be voted out. The one thing they owe us in return is to earn our trust by doing the job well and out in the open.

They are not doing the job well. Public confidence in the Court has fallen to near record lows, and rulings like this are why. An institution meant to represent the whole country has drifted into representing power, and stopped answering to the people who fund it and live under it.

You do not have to be a lawyer to see it. You only have to count who a court like this protects, and who it leaves exposed.

The bottom line

Six justices said appearance could be a factor.

Agents went looking for people who looked deportable.

The two they killed this month were not even the ones they were after.

We paid for all of it — the standard, the stops, the outcome. Innocent people are dead, and their deaths trace straight back to a rule that let a hunch stand in for cause.

This is one ruling. But it is not an accident, and it is not the last. A court that decides questions this large in the dark, and gets them this wrong, has stopped doing its job.

That is not spending our taxes well. It is time to reconsider the standard — and the Court that set it.

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