This generation just waking up to militarized govt agents violently arresting, jailing people based on their brown skin [View all]
...or where they work, or how they speak.
It's an abomination against humanity that America has returned to the time when government once singled out and targeted black and brown people for arrest and abuse; even encouraging and protecting others who would abuse and discriminate against people who didn't look white; all to disadvantage them in every aspect of society and functionally deny them rights and defenses of their citizenship which their white counterparts are routinely granted.
Wherever Trump has deployed his militarized, irregular immigration forces, there's no more expectation of black or brown citizens to be able to even walk down the street without risk of being outright assaulted by armed, armored and masked government agents who are simply brutalizing the people they encounter, detaining them first and making determinations about their ability to continue to detain them much later.
And, it's not just undocumented migrants, not by a long shot, and certainly not the 'worst of the worst' or even people with any criminal record at all are being arrested and detained, often brutally and without any concern for the lives they've abruptly been ripped away from. No concern for any children or family obligations at home; no concern for the state of their unattended home or property; just accosting them on the street and whisking them away to a process where they, perverse to our democracy and laws, are made to prove they're worthy to be released.
Not criminals, not drug gang members, but mothers, fathers, siblings, little children treated like dangerous criminals in a process that's more violent than anything any of these working-class people would ever experience in their neighborhoods.
Trump said they were a 'war-zone' and he set about making that a reality, but it's nothing but the government warring against black and brown people. His cosplay soldiers are advantaging something that I don't believe was this expressly discriminating, coming from the highest offices in the land, at any other time since Reconstruction.
from Slate:
Three weeks ago, the Supreme Court greenlit that approach, effectively legalizing racial profiling in immigration enforcement by a 6–3 vote. Although the majority did not explain its decision, Justice Brett Kavanaugh tried to muster a defense in a solo concurrence whose reasoning crumbled upon scrutiny. Kavanaugh insisted that ICE agents may use a person’s “apparent ethnicity” as a “relevant factor” when deciding whether to arrest them. But he assured readers that agents may use ethnicity only in combination with other, nonracial factors when deciding whom to target. He also insisted that these “immigration stops” are a minor inconvenience for “those individuals who are legally in the country,” writing: “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 or otherwise legally in the United States.”
In the short time since Kavanaugh wrote that opinion, his assertions have been proved demonstrably, almost laughably false too many times to count. As Sherrilyn Ifill notes, the justice’s claims were already belied by the factual record in that case, which showed ICE agents violently harassing and detaining American citizens for extended periods simply because they are Latino. Now the agency, freed from constitutional restraints by SCOTUS, has stopped pretending to be engaged in anything other than racial profiling. Bovino’s admission only confirms what we already knew: These detentions, far from the “brief” inconvenience Kavanaugh described, are often lengthy, violent, and dangerous. Ifill and Anil Kalhan, a professor of law at Drexel University, have proposed calling these detainments “Kavanaugh stops,” a label that’s quickly catching on.
Perhaps the most comprehensive account of Kavanaugh stops so far arrived last Thursday, in the form of a new lawsuit against the Trump administration brought by victims of racial profiling in the District of Columbia. The plaintiffs, a group of citizens and legal residents, describe ICE and Customs and Border Protection agents detaining them for hours—or even overnight—because they happen to be Latino. These accounts make a mockery of Kavanaugh’s insistence that these stops are brief and painless for those who have a right to live in this country.
read more: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/10/scotus-analysis-kavanaugh-stops-supreme-court-lawsuit.html
'Kavanaugh stops' deprive me and members of my family of my full citizenship rights to move freely in this country. More importantly, they deprive my state the ability to protect those rights under the "privileges and immunities" clause.
Freedom of movement under United States law is governed primarily by the Privileges and Immunities Clause of the United States Constitution which states, "The Citizens of each State shall be entitled to all Privileges and Immunities of Citizens in the several States." Since the circuit court ruling in Corfield v. Coryell, 6 Fed. Cas. 546 (1823), freedom of movement has been judicially recognized as a fundamental Constitutional right. In Paul v. Virginia, 75 U.S. 168 (1869), the court defined freedom of movement as "right of free ingress into other States, and egress from them." However, the Supreme Court did not invest the federal government with the authority to protect freedom of movement. Under the "privileges and immunities" clause, this authority was given to the states, a position the court held consistently through the years in cases such as Ward v. Maryland, 79 U.S. 418 (1871), the Slaughter-House Cases, 83 U.S. 36 (1873) and United States v. Harris, 106 U.S. 629 (1883).
The Constitution and federal statutes set some rules for police actions, including in the area of racial profiling. Most relevant, the Fourth Amendment requires individual justification for searches and seizures, and the Equal Protection Clause bars most law- enforcement decisions based on race. In addition, two federal statutes, 34 U.S.C. § 12601 and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, allow for racial profiling suits against police departments. Fourth Amendment Constraints on Searches and Seizures The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution protects “the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.”
It does not specifically prohibit racial profiling, but courts would not consider stops and searches based solely on a subject’s race to be reasonable seizures because police have identified no individualized reason for suspicion. The Amendment has been interpreted to permit police to detain a person briefly for investigative purposes if an officer has a reasonable suspicion “that criminal activity may be afoot.”
A mere “hunch” or inarticulable suspicion does not meet this standard. And “law enforcement officers must satisfy escalating legal standards of ‘reasonableness’ for each level of intrusion upon a person—stop, search, seizure, and arrest.” Courts have held that an officer cannot meet the Fourth Amendment standard by relying on a person’s racial appearance, alone, as grounds for reasonable suspicion. By contrast, the officer may use race, for Congressional Research Service https://crsreports.congress.gov LSB10524 Congressional Research Service 2 example, searching for a person matching a suspect’s description and part of that description is the suspect’s race.
That said, an officer’s groundless use of race by itself does not violate the Fourth Amendment; it is performing a search or seizure without individualized justification that violates this provision. As long as they can point to individualized justification, the personal motives of an officer are not a factor in the Fourth Amendment analysis.
https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/LSB10524
MSNBC news reports:
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