50 Days of Kavanaugh Stops
By 
The face of Fourth Amendment nullification, and nobody deserves it more:
A privileged, white, East Coast elite lawyer who attended private schools and would not be subject to the law enforcement operation he was OK’ing, Kavanaugh, appointed to the Supreme Court by Trump in the president’s first term, provided an underwhelming and heavily criticized justification for the decision.
By being the only justice who supported the decision who wrote anything, he has — whether he wanted to or not — become the face of this racist decision.
Enter the “Kavanaugh stop.”
[…]
I asked Justice Kavanaugh on October 14, “Do you have any comment on the ICE stop of Maria Greeley, a U.S. citizen, who was reportedly stopped, ziptied, and told she didn’t ‘look like’ a ‘Greeley’ despite being a U.S. citizen?“
On both occasions, I also asked Kavanaugh whether he still thinks he was correct when he wrote that these stops are “typically brief” and that all of this is fine because “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.”
Finally, I asked Kavanaugh if he was aware of the “Kavanaugh stop” terminology and whether he had any comment on it.
Kavanaugh had not responded to either inquiry when, on October 16, Pro Publica published an in-depth report identifying “more than 50 Americans who were held after [immigration] agents questioned their citizenship” since Trump re-took office.
So, I asked Justice Kavanaugh on October 16, “Do you have any comment on the Pro Publica report that found ‘more than 50 Americans who were held after [immigration] agents questioned their citizenship’ during 2025. ‘They were almost all Latino,’ per the report.“
In addition to the other questions previously raised, I also asked Kavanaugh whether “the possibility of after-the-fact ‘excessive force’ claims” is “a sufficient answer to this ongoing, regularly occurring problem?”
I have not received a response from him or his chambers.
On Friday, David Bier, the director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute, shared a video of U.S. Border Patrol officers outside of a Walmart in Cicero, Illinois, following and confronting a woman leaving her car, asking her, “Were you born here? Were you born here, ma’am?” What country were you born in?“
“What a sick world,“ he wrote.
That is a Kavanaugh stop.
Actually trying to provide some justification for a shadow docket order has gone so badly we can expect even less attempted law going forward.