A Sept. 8 Supreme Court decision gives permission to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to continue sweeps in the Los Angeles area that critics and federal judges said amounted to racial profiling.

The limited-scope decision came down in an unsigned, emergency action that did not disclose which justices voted to side with President Donald Trump’s administration and offered no reasoning. But it nonetheless temporarily overturned decisions from the lower courts that blocked ICE from making stops based only on race, language, location and occupation.

All that is known about the justices’ views is that conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh largely agreed with the decision, and three liberal justices — Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Kentanji Brown Jackson — disagreed.

Here’s what to know about the decision.

Latino US citizens said ICE ambushed them in the streets

The case, Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo, started when a group of Latino residents from California and related workers’ organizations sued the government, saying they were being subject to illegal stops as part of an enforcement blitz that started June 5 in the Los Angeles area.

In one case, a U.S. citizen born and raised in east LA said he was standing on a sidewalk when agents ran toward him with handguns and military-style rifles and repeatedly asked if he was an American. Despite saying he was, they pressed him to say what hospital he was born in, the lawsuit says, but he did not know.

The agents pushed him against a metal fence, put his hands behind his back and twisted his arm, according to the lawsuit. The man eventually produced his Real ID, a type of special drivers license that requires someone to show proof of legal residence. According to the lawsuit, agents took his Real ID and his phone, returning his phone minutes later but never returning his ID.

The Trump administration has a four-part test for immigration stops

The Trump administration has been using four criteria to see who ICE agents can stop for immigration inquiries, according to court documents. They are: (1) apparent race or ethnicity; (2) speaking Spanish or English with an accent; (3) presence at a particular location such as a carwash or day laborer pickup site; and (4) the type of work the person does.

The people who sued the administration argued that it was illegal for the administration to solely use these criteria. The Trump administration wrote in a court filing that the people suing and the courts themselves acknowledge that “ICE at least sometimes relies on additional factors.”

Two federal courts sided with the people who were stopped

A trial court in California called ICE's practices an officially sanctioned “pattern of conduct” and said that even though there was no evidence of an “official policy” for these four criteria, immigration agents were routinely using them to make stops. The court barred the administration from relying solely on the criteria to make stops in the Los Angeles area and required ICE to use a higher legal standard called "reasonable suspicion" to conduct stops.

The Trump administration appealed, and an appeals court agreed with the lower court. But the Trump administration then appealed to the Supreme Court for an emergency ruling, essentially saying law enforcement were being prohibited from doing their jobs.

The Supreme Court’s limited decision, which came Sept. 8, lets ICE return to using the four criteria in the Los Angeles area, at least during the current stage in the legal process.

In a blistering dissent, Sotomayor, a liberal justice, called the decision a "grave misuse" of the court's emergency power. "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," she wrote.

Legal technicalities could’ve played a role

The Trump administration argued that the people who sued them didn’t have the right to do so, an issue that can get a case thrown out. The administration wrote that the people’s allegations were “entirely speculative” and that they offered nothing to prove their premise that they could be stopped again by ICE.

The justices who sided with the Trump administration in the one-paragraph decision did not address this issue, so Americans don’t know if the justices sided with the administration based solely on this technicality. However, in his own opinion that only represented his view, Kavanaugh agreed with the Trump administration.

“Plaintiffs have no good basis to believe that law enforcement will stop them in the future based on the prohibited factors — and certainly no good basis for believing that any stop of the plaintiffs is imminent,” Kavanaugh wrote.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Supreme Court said ICE can stop you based on race, accent, job and location. What we know.

Reporting by Erin Mansfield, USA TODAY / USA TODAY

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