The Supreme Court on Monday lifted a judge’s limits on Los Angeles-area immigration stops based on a person speaking Spanish or working in a certain profession. 

The Trump administration urged the high court for the emergency intervention, calling the order a “straitjacket” on enforcement efforts in an epicenter of the president’s immigration crackdown.

The ruling appeared to fall along the court’s 6-3 ideological lines, though the justices are not required to publicly disclose their votes in emergency orders. The one-paragraph order contained no explanation, as is typical.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh, Trump’s second appointee to the court, penned a solo opinion indicating the plaintiffs likely have no legal right to sue and the administration is likely to succeed in defeating the lawsuit, regardless.

“To conclude otherwise, this Court would likely have to overrule or significantly narrow two separate lines of precedents,” Kavanaugh wrote in the 10-page concurring opinion. 

In dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said her colleagues’ decision is “unconscionably irreconcilable with our Nation’s constitutional guarantees.” Sotomayor was joined by the court’s other two justices appointed by Democratic presidents, Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. 

“That decision is yet another grave misuse of our emergency docket,” Sotomayor wrote. “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.” 

It marks the administration’s latest victory at the Supreme Court, which has regularly intervened on its emergency docket so Trump can resume parts of his sweeping agenda halted by lower judges. 

U.S. District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong imposed the limits in July after a group of individuals stopped by ICE and private organizations sued over what they decried as unconstitutional “roving patrols" in the Los Angeles area.

Frimpong, an appointee of former President Biden, agreed they had shown the administration was likely violating the Fourth Amendment by stopping people without reasonable suspicion.

Her order prevented immigration authorities from relying on four factors to conduct immigration stops and arrests: someone’s race, use of Spanish, type of work or physical presence at a location where migrants in the country unlawfully are known to gather.

The ruling applied to the Central District of California, where more than 20 million people live. It includes Los Angeles as well as surrounding cities such as Riverside, San Bernardino and San Luis Obispo.

“Especially in an area where 1 in 10 people are present illegally, it defies common sense to hold that the government cannot use these factors to meet that low bar,” Solicitor General D. John Sauer wrote in the government’s Supreme Court papers. 

Sauer warned that the lower ruling was hamstringing enforcement efforts by raising the possibility of contempt when agents conduct immigration raids in the district. 

The plaintiffs, represented by the American Civil Liberties Union and other groups, warned the justices that intervening could “ensnare in an immigration dragnet” the millions of U.S. citizens in the district. 

“The district court broke no new legal ground,” they wrote in court filings. 

Los Angeles and other local jurisdictions backed the plaintiffs, invoking in their Supreme Court papers former President Reagan’s famous “shining city upon a hill” speech. 

“Those are the principles on which this nation was founded, and on which it has flourished,” the cities wrote. “Yet now our federal government tells this Court that anyone in the United States —including American citizens — can be stopped, and even detained, based on ‘apparent ethnicity.’”