The Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision was both a legal and cultural earthquake. It sent a powerful message that racism would no longer find refuge in the American Constitution.

Of course, Brown couldn’t ensure that race prejudice would disappear from this country or even from public education. Nor could it prevent racism from rearing its ugly head in other areas of American life.

It was nonetheless stunning to read the court’s Sept. 8 decision allowing Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to resume using “people’s apparent race or ethnicity; the fact that they speak English with an accent or speak Spanish; their presence at particular locations like farms or pickup sites for day laborers; and the type of work they do to decide who to stop and detain.”

In the post-Brown era, much racial discrimination was driven underground, hidden in a fog of facially neutral standards that sort people on the basis of race without ever mentioning it. But not in the Trump administration, whose constitutional philosophy is to openly ignore the document, unless or until the Supreme Court stops it from doing so.

In the ICE case, the court did just the opposite, staying out of the way while the administration turns the........

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