Engineered Discrimination: The Architecture of Race-Based Exclusion in U.S. Immigration

The patterns documented in this brief are not a collection of isolated enforcement errors. It is a coordinated structural transformation of U.S. immigration enforcement from a conduct-based system into an identity-based one, and the evidence shows it was deliberately engineered at every level of government simultaneously.

The foundation of this transformation is the replacement of individualized adjudication with group identity as the operative legal standard.

• Presidential Proclamation 10949, issued June 4, 2025, placed nationals of 12 countries under a full entry ban and 7 under a partial ban (Federal Register).
• Presidential Proclamation 10998, issued December 16, 2025, expanded the full ban to 19 countries and the partial ban to 20, and eliminated the prior exception for immediate relatives of U.S. citizens, meaning spouses, parents, and minor children of American citizens from banned countries are now barred from entry.

The American Immigration Council found that even the initial ban's design swept in individuals whose entry posed no clear risk, characterizing it as a tool to restrict immigration from disfavored countries rather than a narrowly tailored security measure (American Immigration Council). By January 21, 2026, the U.S. Department of State had paused immigrant visa issuance for nationals of 75 countries, with no individualized risk findings provided for any of them (State Department). This is not border security. This is administrative classification of human beings by national origin, without inquiry into who they are.

What makes this moment distinct from prior enforcement surges is the deliberate construction of a self-reinforcing legal architecture, one in which the constitutional violation is no longer an aberration but a structurally authorized feature at every tier of government. In Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo (September 8, 2025), the Supreme Court permitted the use of race, ethnicity, speaking Spanish, and working in immigrant-heavy professions such as landscaping as bases for reasonable suspicion for immigration enforcement (Oxford). North Carolina codified mandatory ICE-sheriff cooperation into state law, permanently embedding the arrest pipeline into the local criminal justice system (NBC News).

Similarly, Florida made the Highway Patrol the inaugural member of a revived 287(g) Task Force program,6 an initiative previously discontinued in late 2012 due to efficiency concerns and documented civil rights abuses, due to efficiency concerns and documented civil rights abuses, specifically racial profiling violations (Governing, American Immigration Council). The judiciary, the executive, and state legislatures are not independently arriving at the same place. They are building the same structure from different directions.

The hidden architecture of this system is most visible in the actors who operate within it. The evidence shows these are not rogue actors. This is the system functioning as designed.

• Former CBP Chief Patrol Agent Gregory Bovino deployed the same vehicle stop and public space sweep tactics, already ruled illegal by a federal judge in Kern County, across Los Angeles, Chicago, Charlotte, and Minneapolis, operating under direct authorization from former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and former political advisor Corey Lewandowski, bypassing ICE's normal command structure entirely (WBEZ).
• ICE Acting Director Todd Lyons authored an internal memo that eliminated risk-of-flight analysis from warrantless arrest decisions, replacing community-tie considerations with purely logistical factors, a written internal policy designed to maximize arrest volume while remaining formally deniable, ruled inconsistent with existing law by a federal judge on February 13, 2026 (Block Club).
• Florida Highway Patrol Trooper John Petrofsky, who conducted one of the state's most high-profile immigration arrests, recorded no Hispanic drivers in a Hispanic-majority town over the course of a year, systematically misclassifying Hispanic drivers as white in official records to prevent auditing of his own profiling (WLRN).

The human cost of this architecture falls disproportionately on people whose legal status offers no protection. FOIA records from Michigan show that over 96% of individuals apprehended by CBP statewide were non-white, and that speaking Spanish or another foreign language was the documented basis for stops in 19.2% of cases. Furthermore, Border Patrol's own logs show that more than 33% of those stopped were actually U.S. citizens (ACLU).

A five-year-old with a pending asylum case was apprehended by ICE as he arrived home from preschool, with school officials stating he was used as bait to arrest family members (Brookings). Mubashir Khalif Hussen, a 20-year-old U.S. citizen, was detained despite repeatedly stating his citizenship, with agents refusing to examine his ID (ACLU). Legal status, citizenship, and age have become irrelevant variables. Perceived ethnicity is the operative one.

This pattern has domestic historical precedent. The U.S. government applied identity-based detention without individual adjudication to its own citizens during World War II, confining Japanese Americans solely on the basis of ethnic origin with no individual finding of risk or criminal conduct (National Archives). The Supreme Court upheld the practice in Korematsu v. United States (1944) only to formally repudiate it in 2018, inside a ruling that simultaneously upheld a nationality-based travel ban (Politico). The repudiation was real. The underlying legal architecture it repudiated was not dismantled. It was repurposed.

What this brief documents is not a malfunction of American democratic institutions. It is those institutions operating under a different set of organizing principles, ones in which national origin and ethnic identity determine legal exposure, administrative memos replace judicial oversight, and the machinery of enforcement is calibrated to volume rather than individualized justice. This evidence moves the debate beyond the fact of abuse to the survival of oversight. The status quo the US government is applying is one where basic human rights are deliberately and systematically denied (Brookings).