The Supreme Court this week granted the Trump administration an emergency stay that revives key Immigration and Customs Enforcement tactics in and around Los Angeles while litigation continues. The order halts a lower-court injunction issued by Biden-appointed District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong, who had barred ICE from conducting certain immigration stops absent traditional probable cause after a series of high-profile operations in the city.

For the White House, the stay is a green light to keep pressing its interior-enforcement campaign. For the Court’s liberal bloc, it’s an abuse of the emergency docket with dangerous civil-liberties implications. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, fired off a sharp dissent accusing the majority of short-circuiting the fact-finding process and sanctioning sweeping seizures before the issues are fully vetted.

“Instead of allowing the District Court to consider these troubling allegations in the normal course, a majority of this Court decides to take the once-extraordinary step of staying the District Court’s order,” Sotomayor wrote, calling the move “yet another grave misuse of our emergency docket.” She warned, “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.”

The majority did not publish a full opinion, as is typical with stays, but the outcome speaks for itself: pending appeal, ICE agents may resume the disputed practices under existing federal statutes. In other words, the justices signaled that the administration made a sufficient showing that the government is likely to prevail—or at least that the lower court’s order was overly broad and disruptive to nationwide enforcement.

That dividing line—policy versus law—is the crux of the fight. The dissent rails against what it views as discriminatory policing; the administration argues that immigration officers have distinct statutory and constitutional authorities that don’t track one-to-one with ordinary criminal-probable-cause rules. If Congress wants tighter restraints, the majority’s posture implies, Congress can write them. Until then, judges shouldn’t rewrite the immigration code from the bench.

The stay also resets the politics. California Gov. Gavin Newsom had cheered the injunction as proof that “justice has prevailed” after ICE swept through Los Angeles worksites and neighborhoods. Now the Supreme Court has effectively told him not so fast. Expect California officials and allied activist groups to pivot back to state and local resistance—sanctuary provisions, litigation, and PR campaigns—as federal teams resume operations.

For Trump, timing matters. The order lands as his administration expands detention capacity, deploys hundreds of additional agents to blue-city hotspots, and leans into a law-and-order message that has polled well beyond the Republican base. A Supreme Court assist—even a procedural one—bolsters the frame that the White House is restoring the rule of law while progressive judges and politicians try to tie its hands.

None of this settles the core legal questions. A stay isn’t a merits ruling, and the case will continue through the appellate pipeline, where factual records and statutory arguments will get a fuller airing. Plaintiffs will press claims that ICE practices run afoul of the Fourth and Fifth Amendments; the government will counter with decades of precedent recognizing distinct immigration-enforcement tools at the border and in the interior. The Supreme Court could be asked to revisit the matter again if a final judgment issues against either side.

But the signal is clear enough for now. The Court’s conservatives are wary of nationwide injunctions that upend federal operations on thin records. The liberals are increasingly vocal about what they see as a rubber-stamp “shadow docket” favoring the executive. And on the ground, ICE will keep moving—raids, stops, and removals—while California scrambles for new ways to slow them down.

Translation: Trump won the round that decides who acts while the lawyers argue.