THIS WEEK IN…

DEMOCRATIC EROSION

On Monday, the conservative majority on the Supreme Court handed down a one-page order that allowed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to conduct roving patrols and effectively use racial profiling to stop and detain people for no other reason than their skin color, the language they are speaking or suspicions about their national origin, without requiring clear evidence or a warrant. In essence, the court has allowed federal agents to target people not for what they have done, but for who they appear. Civil liberties advocates warn that this undermines the Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure.

Historian Garrett Graff on what the decision means for civil liberties and how it marks the arrival of an unprecedented style of domestic policing: ICE is Eating the Soul of America.

Matt Ford on the decision’s implications for U.S. democracy: Brett Kavanaugh’s Shadow Docket Attack on Your Civil Liberties. Whether motivated by animus or naïveté, the justice’s rationale for permitting law enforcement to racially profile suspects has dark implications for democracy.

Erwin Chemerinsky Dean of UC Berkeley School of Law on how any hope the court would be a check on the Trump administration seems lost: The Supreme Court’s brazen approval of racial profiling.

Investigative journalist Radley Balko put together a list of what happened in just one month of the Trump administration’s dizzying push toward autocracy, painting a dire picture of the state of U.S. democracy: One Month of Authoritarianism

…in other news

The constant presence of heavily armed troops and police take the joy out of spending a lovely late summer evening at a street cafe or restaurant in Washington, D.C. Some businesses struggle to stay afloat. What is it like on the frontlines of the president’s war against the city? 

The president could not enjoy his dinner, either, though for different reasons.  “Trump is the Hitler of our time”, chanted the protestors who joined the president during his restaurant visit.