Discrimination gets a bad rap. So does prejudice.

Think about it: We discriminate — we prejudge things — every day, hundreds of times, in ways large and small, consciously and unconsciously. And we have since the dawn of time. We discriminate when we select the apple without the wormhole. When we gnaw on the fleshy hindquarter without the maggots on it. When we avoid those packs of fast, fanged, furry creatures on the Serengeti plain. When we — as George Carlin confessed during a comedic skit at the height of the AIDS scare — refrain from “humping any Haitian hemophiliac homosexual heroin addicts.” When we — as Jesse Jackson admitted many years ago in a rare moment of unbridled honesty — “walk down the street and hear footsteps and … look around and see somebody white and feel relieved.” And when our Transportation Security Administration focuses more on young Muslim men than it does on 96-year-old women in wheelchairs. Oh, wait.

In any case, if we didn’t discriminate, if we didn’t categorize things, if we didn’t use our brains to prejudge our environment and adapt our behavior accordingly, we’d have ceased to exist as a species long ago.

So, too, with what the anti-science Left likes to call racial profiling, a practice that, for law enforcement, has been a necessary tool for fighting crime and protecting the citizenry in the most efficient and effective manner.

Did any of these stubborn facts weigh into the Supreme Court’s decision yesterday to overrule two misguided (read: leftist) lower courts and lift restrictions on the aggressive immigration enforcement measures being employed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in California? They’d never admit it, of course, but they didn’t need to — because the law and the Constitution were on their side.

Those lower courts had claimed that ICE was in violation of the Fourth Amendment when it targeted suspects who looked and talked more like Kilmar Abrego Garcia and Jose Antonia Ibarra than, say, Jimmy Kimmel or Stephen Colbert.

As Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in his concurring opinion:

Immigration stops based on reasonable suspicion of illegal presence have been an important component of U.S. immigration enforcement for decades, across several presidential administrations. … The interests of individuals who are illegally in the country in avoiding being stopped by law enforcement for questioning is ultimately an interest in evading the law. That is not an especially weighty legal interest.“

Admittedly, it’s a radical concept, this notion that police investigation should be legal. But, hey, if you want to fight crime, you’ve got to go where the crime is. You don’t go where it isn’t.

Put another way, if you want to stop the black-on-black genocide in our nation’s capital, you hit the mean streets of DC rather than looking for killers in Café Milano or Le Diplomate.

So, too, if you want to round up the worst of the worst of the illegal aliens, you go to the sanctuary states and the sanctuary cities where they’re most likely to be hanging out. In other words, you go to the very places Gavin Newsom and Karen Bass tell you not to go.

Not everyone agrees, though. For the opposing (read: pro-crime) point of view, I give you the second-dimmest of the Dems’ two dim-bulb justices, Sonia Sotomayor, who hyperbolized that the decision was "unconscionably irreconcilable with our Nation’s constitutional guarantees.” Not content with such simplistic reasoning, she added: “We should not have to live in a country where the Government can seize anyone who looks Latino, speaks Spanish, and appears to work a low wage job. Rather than stand idly by while our constitutional freedoms are lost, I dissent.”

Sotomayor also whined about the Court’s employment of the emergency docket to adjudicate this case in (relatively) short order, thereby allowing Donald Trump and his administration to go about its constitutionally mandated Article II authority — you know, that stuff about taking care “that the Laws be faithfully executed,” that sort of thing.

Former federal prosecutor Andy McCarthy sees things differently, calling the decision “a blow for common sense.” He notes: “California Democrats and others on the anti-borders, pro–illegal immigration left, whose claims are unfortunately echoed by the Court’s three progressive justices, have engaged in the worst sort of demagogy.”

As McCarthy rightly adds: “A person’s characteristics can never be the sole reason for triggering an investigation, but neither do they establish immunity from investigation.”

And that pretty much sums it up. Unless you’re an open-borders leftist.