Edited by Carys Farrar, Sean Sudalaimani, and Sudipta Rout
Abstract
Although the Fourth Amendment is generally framed as protecting procedural rights and the Fourteenth Amendment as safeguarding substantive equality, the two are deeply interrelated in practice. While the doctrinal separation of constitutional amendments is a well-documented phenomenon, existing scholarship has paid little attention to its impact on immigration enforcement. This article examines Vasquez Perdomo v. Noem to assess how the Supreme Court’s compartmentalization of these constitutional values can obscure the intersection of legality and equality. In Vasquez Perdomo, the Court’s analysis focused on facially neutral rationales without addressing how these justifications often functioned as proxies for race and national origin. By maintaining a formal separation between these doctrines, courts may uphold enforcement practices that are procedurally lawful yet disproportionately affect racial and ethnic minorities. By examining how procedural legality can coexist with substantive inequality, this article provides a framework for understanding the constitutional blind spots that arise when procedural and equality-based analyses remain doctrinally distinct.
