Brett Kavanaugh’s Shadow Docket Attack on Your Civil Liberties
Starting early this year, the Trump administration carried out what it dubbed as “Operation At Large” in the greater Los Angeles area. ICE agents and other federal law enforcement officials fanned out throughout the city, sometimes accompanied by National Guard reservists who had been federalized by Trump in an authoritarian show of force. Among the tactics they used was stopping people and aggressively questioning them on whether they were U.S. citizens.
The Fourth Amendment generally forbids “unreasonable searches and seizures,” including stops where a person is detained in public. The federal district court held that the vague rationales cited by immigration agents did not meet the threshold of “reasonable suspicion.” To that end, she enjoined the government from making stops that “rely solely on the factors below, alone or in combination.”
Those factors were the person’s “apparent race or ethnicity,” as well as “speaking Spanish or speaking English with an accent,” their “presence at a particular location (e.g., bus stop, car wash, tow yard, day laborer pick up site, agricultural site),” or “the type of work one does.” While this may fit crude, popular stereotypes of undocumented immigrants—White House aide Stephen Miller reportedly demanded that ICE agents focus their efforts on Home Depots and 7-11s earlier this year—they also cover a great many people who are not. Most of the plaintiffs in the case, all of whom were stopped or detained by ICE at one point, identified themselves as U.S. citizens or lawfully present immigrants.