ABSTRACT
The road to racial profiling in the United States, it turns out, was paved on those dirt paths. There, the United States Supreme Court opened the door to racial profiling, and it did so at the most sensitive location, the place where ethnicity and appearance were at their most salient. Naturally, racial profiling has not stopped at the border. As politicians became increasingly concerned with extralegal immigration in the mid-twentieth century, the INS Border Patrol, the agency in charge of patrolling the borders of the United States, refined its techniques for detecting immigrants travelling inland, narrowing its primary arsenal to three main devices: the fixed INS checkpoint, the temporary checkpoint and roving patrols. The Court paved a constitutional path to racial profiling in the United States, constructing a four-part legal structure that frames consideration of the 'legal use' of race in policing. The third constitutional pillar of racial profiling analysis is focused on Equal Protection analysis.
