You see the housekeepers of Los Angeles County, the people who keep hundreds of thousands of homes clean and in working order, standing at the end of the work day in the shade of the big trees, very much on their employers’ properties, well back from the sidewalk, waiting to be picked up by their cousins or their daughters.

Calm yet wary, constitutionally sound: Got a warrant, Mr. Federale? Because this property is private.

You do not see many any longer on the bus benches, as who can afford to be such a sitting duck for an ICE raid?

This week, they may have heard through the grapevine that there’s some kind of stay on the outrageous, racially profiling operations across the Southland by the militarized men hiding behind masks.

But that’s about as trustable in the long run as the man in the White House who convinced many of their American citizen friends and family members to vote for him out of some misguided solidarity with ranchero machismo.

Who is the least trustable man on the planet, as the world knows, to its doomscrolling sorrow.

The people of L.A. County may have been granted a temporary reprieve from the authoritarian menace. No one in our suddenly pessimistic age is counting on anything good lasting. Remember when Americans were lightly mocked as being overly can-do shameless optimists? Those days are long gone.

The lede on the City News Service story we ran yesterday, coupled with the poignant photo by Mario Tama of Getty Images showing some of your neighbors staring through the grate at the Metropolitan Detention Center, hoping to get a glimpse of loved ones: “LOS ANGELES — The Trump administration will appeal a Los Angeles federal judge’s orders limiting the ability of federal agents to detain people without reasonable suspicion beyond their race, ethnicity or occupation, the White House said on Sunday.”

It’s simply sickening, hearing the autocratic Trumpsters lying when they pretend that’s not how and why some people — our housekeepers, the car-washers, the taqueros — are being snatched off the street, and other people — you and me — are not.

They are arresting people because they are Brown. Full stop.

Many is the time over the 38 years that I have been writing this column that I have praised in happy wonder the fact that this is one of the few countries on Earth in which no one need carry papers of any kind when out and about to show to the “authorities.”

There are no authorities constitutionally able to require of a pedestrian that they provide ID. If you’re not doing anything immediately wrong, and the copper doesn’t have a warrant for your arrest, you can just move right along, and you can take a picture if you like of the uniformed person, no matter if he pretends you cannot.

What nonsense from the authoritarians, lamenting the fact that orders from those enforcing the United States Constitution are null and void because they come from “unelected judges.” (Did someone elect the head of ICE? It’s quite sad to see Mexico, by the way, switching to an elected judiciary, which will be constantly at the mercy o of the country’s president.)

The 52-page ruling now protecting our friends and neighbors comes from the brilliant Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong, born in Los Angeles to immigrants from Ghana. She was the valedictorian at the vaunted Vivian Webb School for Girls in Claremont. She graduated from Harvard magna cum laude. She went to Yale Law. And because she understands the Constitution of her country, she reminded the White House that federal agents can’t rely solely on race, speaking with an accent, sitting at a bus stop, waiting at a day laborer site or working at a restaurant or farm as a basis for detaining people. And, being aware of prisoners’ rights, she also ordered immigration agencies to ensure detainees have access to attorneys seven days a week, with their calls not wiretapped.

Meanwhile, the Trump team will fight to be able to send masked assault-rifle toting paramilitary agents out to arrest people under the probable cause of sitting on a bus bench while Brown.

“These events are unprecedented in American history,” the plaintiffs’ attorney argued in Frimpong’s court. Pardon the small amount of American optimism I have left in hoping against hope that they remain so.

Write the public editor at lwilson@scng.com