CHICAGO (WLS) — The Supreme Court on Monday cleared the way for federal agents to conduct sweeping immigration operations in Los Angeles, the latest victory for President Donald Trump’s administration at the high court.

The justices lifted a restraining order from a judge who found that “roving patrols” were conducting indiscriminate arrests in LA. The ruling barred agents from stopping people solely based on their race, language, job, or location.

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It’s unclear if the ruling applies beyond Los Angeles.

But legal experts and advocates tell the I-Team they fear those same tactics will be deployed in Chicago, just as the threat of a mass incursion of immigration agents comes to fruition, newly labeled by the Department of Homeland Security as operation “Midway Blitz.”

On Sunday, video provided to ABC7 shows Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents — identified by worn ICE badges — handcuffing a man who neighbors know as a flower vendor on Chicago’s Southwest Side.

Advocates fear it may have been the start of operation “Midway Blitz,” a small-scale version of the mass arrests of migrants in Los Angeles from back in June, the very kind of raids and arrests immigration advocates filed a class action suit trying to stop.

U.S. District Judge Maame E. Frimpong in Los Angeles had found a “mountain of evidence” that enforcement tactics were violating the Constitution. The plaintiffs included U.S. citizens swept up in immigration stops.

Trump’s Republican administration argued the order wrongly restricted agents carrying out its widespread crackdown on illegal immigration.

An appeals court had left Frimpong’s ruling in place.

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But in an emergency 31-page ruling published Monday, the Supreme Court’s six conservative justices lifted restrictions against aggressive immigration enforcement tactics by federal agents.

“Can ICE agents detain someone on the basis of some combination of their ethnicity or race, their speaking Spanish or English with an accent, their location at a particular kind of location, and they’re working a particular kind of job? The answer to that now is yes,” said ABC 7 Chief Legal Analyst Gil Soffer.

Speaking at the site of that mass Home Depot raid, a fuming Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass fired back.

“I want the entire nation to hear me when I say, this isn’t just an attack on the people of Los Angeles,” Bass said. “This is an attack on every person in this city and in every city in our country.”

Here in Chicago, speaking at a Monday news conference, Any Huamani with the Brighton Park Neighborhood Council and the Southwest Side Rapid Response team said the threat of ICE operations is already having a visible impact on many communities.

“No vendors are outside,” Huamani said. “People are afraid, people are scared.”

In the ruling, Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote that for individuals stopped and detained who are legally in the country, “the questioning in those circumstances is typically brief, and those individuals may promptly go free after making clear to the immigration officers that they are U. S. citizens.”

READ MORE | Reports of ICE encounters increase as Trump administration’s ‘Midway Blitz’ operation gets underway

But immigration advocates and legal experts have argued that hasn’t been the case, with reported cases of U.S. citizens detained by ICE for hours, and in some cases days, as they tried to prove they were in the country legally.

“We’ve heard multiple reports of U.S. citizens being held for days, even up to a month, before ice acknowledged their citizenship and released them,” said Nicole Hallett, a professor of Law and director of the Immigrants’ Rights Clinic at the University of Chicago.

“I think this opinion will be read by ICE as giving them carte blanche because they believe that they have the Supreme Court support in these enforcement tactics that they’re undertaking,” Hallett said.

DHS officials called the ruling a “major victory,” arguing “there are no ‘indiscriminate stops’ being made.”

“The Supreme Court simply applied longstanding precedent regarding what qualifies as ‘reasonable suspicion’ under the Fourth Amendment,” a DHS statement reads. “What makes someone a target of ICE is if they are illegally in the U.S.”

In a stinging dissent joined by her two liberal colleagues, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said the decision erodes constitutional freedoms.

“Countless people in the Los Angeles area have been grabbed, thrown to the ground, and handcuffed simply because of their looks, their accents, and the fact they make a living by doing manual labor,” she wrote. “Today, the Court needlessly subjects countless more to these exact same indignities.”

The lawsuit at the center of this ruling will now continue to unfold in California, with a hearing set for Sept. 24.

Since the Supreme Court did not explain its reasoning for the emergency ruling, legal experts tell the I-Team it’s unclear if it directly applies to immigration enforcement in Chicago.

But those same experts said that if similar lawsuits are filed based on immigration enforcement in the city, the high court may rule the same way as they did in Los Angeles.

“This is a ruling by the Supreme Court, and any other case that would be filed, for instance, in Chicago or in any other place would likely also end up at the Supreme Court,” Hallett told the I-Team. “I think it’s a pretty basic principle that we don’t racially profile in this country. And it appears that the Supreme Court has condoned racial profiling in Los Angeles.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.