Erika D. Smith, Columnist

ICE Can Now Racially Profile Almost Half of LA

The Supreme Court’s ruling will fall especially hard on the 48% of Los Angeles County residents who are Hispanic or Latino.

September 10, 2025 at 12:00 PM UTC

By Erika D. Smith

Erika D. Smith is a politics and policy columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. She is a former Los Angeles Times columnist and Sacramento Bee editorial board member.

Standing outside a hardware store is not a crime.
Photographer: Etienne Laurent/AFP/Getty Images

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Some 65 million people living in America today identify as Latino or Hispanic. About 16 million of them live in California. Some are undocumented immigrants, but many are, of course, US citizens or legal immigrants. In Los Angeles County alone, where roughly 1 in 3 residents are immigrants, there are nearly 5 million Latinos. And in the city of LA, roughly half of its 4 million residents are Latino.

These numbers are important for parsing the dire implications of this week’s ruling by the US Supreme Court, which overturned a federal judge in Los Angeles and essentially gave ICE agents carte blanche to resume harassing anyone they think might be an undocumented immigrant using little more than racial profiling as a justification.