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racial profiling
Beware Brett Kavanaugh: Trump's Favorite Justice
It’s frightening but indisputable: The future of American law may rest in his ideological, incompetent hands.
Apr 08, 2026
If I asked you to name the most unpopular Supreme Court justice, you might choose the venal Clarence Thomas or the perpetually enraged Samuel Alito. In either event, you’d be wrong. Americans’ least popular member of the high tribunal is Brett “I like beer” Kavanaugh. Poll after poll has shown Kavanaugh taking the honor since his nomination in 2018.
Kavanaugh also holds the honor of being President Donald Trump’s favorite justice, an accolade he earned with his dissenting opinion from the court’s February invalidation of Trump’s worldwide “reciprocal tariffs.” Kavanaugh is now poised to deliberate on pending voting rights cases and a ruling on birthright citizenship under the 14th Amendment. It’s frightening but indisputable: The future of American law may rest in his ideological, incompetent hands.
Kavanaugh’s initial low public standing stemmed from his snarling televised response to the testimony of psychologist Cristine Blasey Ford, who credibly accused him during his confirmation hearing of sexually assaulting her at a boozy high school party. Declaring his innocence and choking back tears, Kavanaugh described the allegations as “a calculated and orchestrated political hit, fueled with apparent pent-up anger about President Trump [and] millions of dollars in money from outside left-wing opposition groups.” Trump quickly came to his embattled nominee’s rescue in a tweet posted hours after the hearing, calling his testimony “powerful, honest, and riveting.”
Long before Senate Republicans approved his nomination by a vote of 50-48, Kavanaugh had built a well-earned reputation as a credentialed and loyal Republican hitman, highlighted by his decision to join Ken Starr’s Office of Independent Counsel in 1997 to assist in the investigations that eventually led to the impeachment of President Bill Clinton.
Since taking his place on the Supreme Court, Kavanaugh has proven a reliable Trump flunky. But unlike Thomas and Alito, he’s also proven to be an intellectual lightweight.
While in Starr’s service, Kavanaugh penned a lurid memorandum that suggested 10 questions for prosecutors to ask Clinton about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky when he testified before a federal grand jury. Among them:
- “If Monica Lewinsky says that you ejaculated into her mouth on two occasions in the Oval Office area, would she be lying?”
- “If Monica Lewinsky says that on several occasions you had her give [you] oral sex, made her stop, and then ejaculated into the sink in the bathroom off the Oval Office, would she be lying?”
- “If Monica Lewinsky says that you masturbated into a trashcan in your secretary’s office, would she b[e] lying?”
After a brief stint in private practice, Kavanaugh joined the GOP’s legal team in the run-up to the Supreme Court’s infamous Bush v. Gore decision, which handed the presidency to George W. Bush. In 2001, he was rewarded with an associate’s position in the White House counsel’s office, and two years later he was nominated to the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
Senate Democrats were alarmed at the thought of an enrobed Kavanaugh, and they managed to put the nominee through two confirmation hearings. “As I look through all of the different issues that you have been involved in as an attorney in public service and the private sector, it seems that you are the Zelig or Forrest Gump of Republican politics,” the normally mild-mannered Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) remarked in 2004. “You show up at every scene of the crime. You are somehow or another deeply involved, whether it is Elian Gonzalez or the Starr Report, you are there.” In the end, the Democrats failed to stop Kavanaugh’s confirmation in 2006.
During his 12 years on the circuit court, Kavanaugh won praise from right-wing advocacy organizations for a record of overtly pro-business rulings that routinely undercut federal regulations on air quality, consumer protections, and other issues.
Since taking his place on the Supreme Court, Kavanaugh has proven a reliable Trump flunky. But unlike Thomas and Alito, he’s also proven to be an intellectual lightweight, penning few consequential majority opinions of his own and generally following the lead of Chief Justice John Roberts, with whom he voted more than 95% of the time in his first few years on the court.
Recently, however, Kavanaugh has begun to break with Roberts to more closely align with Trump—sometimes to comical effects.
Consider the interim “shadow docket” ruling issued last September, Noem v. Perdomo. The court’s decision lifted a lower-court injunction that had barred Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in Los Angeles from detaining suspected undocumented immigrants based solely on their ethnicity, language, geographic location, and occupations. Like most shadow docket decisions, the Perdomo order was bare-bones, comprising a single paragraph that failed to explain the court’s rationale, but permitted litigation to continue in the lower courts. Kavanaugh, however, took it upon himself to write a 10-page concurrence filled with misstatements of fact and law, in which he argued without evidence that because 10% of people in the Los Angeles region are illegally present, the “totality of circumstances”—including race, location, and language—indicated a high probability that such stops would enable ICE to fulfill its important core mission.
He also added, again without evidence, that any such detentions would be basically benign, reasoning:
The Government sometimes makes brief investigative stops to check the immigration status of those who gather in locations where people are hired for day jobs; who work or appear to work in jobs such as construction, landscaping, agriculture, or car washes that often do not require paperwork and are therefore attractive to illegal immigrants; and who do not speak much if any English. If the officers learn that the individual they stopped is a US citizen or otherwise lawfully in the United States, they promptly let the individual go.
The concurrence was widely panned as authorizing violations of the Fourth Amendment’s requirements of individualized suspicion and probable cause—which soon became known as “Kavanaugh stops.” The criticism became so intense that Kavanaugh was compelled to add a footnote to his concurring opinion in the court’s December shadow docket ruling that struck down the deployment of the National Guard in Chicago (Trump v. Illinois). “The Fourth Amendment requires,” he wrote,
that immigration stops must be based on reasonable suspicion of illegal presence, stops must be brief, arrests must be based on probable cause, and officers must not employ excessive force. Moreover, the officers must not make interior immigration stops or arrests based on race or ethnicity.
The mea culpa did little to restore Kavanaugh’s jurisprudential standing or dignity. In February, his career hit a humiliating low when Chief Justice Roberts publicly rebuked him for essentially cutting and pasting the Trump administration’s arguments for tariffs into his dissenting opinion.
It’s not easy to imagine Kavanaugh sinking much lower than he already has, but one thing remains constant: Trump’s favorite Supreme Court justice has no business casting votes on the most powerful judicial body in the world.
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Jayapal Demands Kristi Noem 'Be Fired, Resign, or Be Impeached'—and DHS 'Dismantled'
“I gave her an opportunity to answer for her agents’ lawlessness,” Jayapal said of the secretary of homeland security. “Instead, what we heard from her was excuses, deflections, and flat-out lies.”
Mar 05, 2026
Surrounded by people who have accused the Department of Homeland Security of violating their civil rights, Rep. Pramila Jayapal on Wednesday demanded that Secretary Kristi Noem be removed from her role as head of the agency.
"Today in the House Judiciary Committee, I questioned Secretary Noem. I gave her an opportunity to answer for her agents' lawlessness and the trauma that her personnel have inflicted on immigrants and citizens alike," Jayapal (D-Wash.) said at a news conference outside the Capitol building. "Instead, what we heard from her was excuses, deflections, and flat-out lies."
Jayapal grilled Noem on Wednesday during her second day of testimony before Congress, accusing her agency of “unlawfully detaining US citizens in violation of the Fourth Amendment."
An investigation published by ProPublica in October found that at least 170 citizens had been arrested or detained by immigration agents, and many more have been reported since.
The congresswoman said that after months of denying, despite the mountain of evidence, that any US citizens had been detained by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Noem finally acknowledged the detention of 18 US citizens by ICE in a letter sent Tuesday.
Jayapal then revealed that four other citizens, "who were not even included" in Noem's letter, were in the hearing room.
She read the story of Patricia O'Keefe, who she said "was monitoring ICE agents when they deployed pepper spray into her car vent without provocation."
"They smashed her car windows, pulled her and her friend out, arrested them for 'obstruction,' and detained them," Jayapal explained. "Patricia saw an entire area dedicated to detaining US citizens."
"An ICE agent also said, 'You guys have to stop obstructing us. That's why that lesbian bitch is dead,' referring to Renee Good," who was shot and killed by an ICE agent in Minneapolis in January. "ICE detained Patricia for over eight hours," Jayapal said.
She relayed the stories of the other citizens in the room, who she said had been detained for several hours for monitoring agents or peacefully protesting.
One was kept in leg irons for six hours after attempting to monitor agents from his car. Another was hit with a pepper ball while protesting and denied medical treatment or the ability to change out of clothes that were coated with dangerous chemicals. Another observer was chased down by agents and had firearms pointed at him before the situation was defused by local police, though he was detained for six hours.
Noting Noem's previous statements that ICE can arrest citizens if they are obstructing law enforcement or if there is "probable cause," Jayapal then asked the people she'd invited about the circumstances of their detention.
All of them responded that they were not charged with any crime after their encounters, that they were not questioned about their citizenship, and that they were all exercising their First Amendment rights.
Asked if she had anything to say to the four individuals or "the millions of American citizens across the country that are watching this and horrified at what your department is doing," Noem responded that “context is critical in each of these situations, to know the full range of what happened in each of these situations before and after the incident and their arrest.”
Jayapal reiterated: "Secretary, not a single one was charged with a crime, and they were detained."
Elsewhere during the hearing, Noem doubled down on her agency's most controversial tactics.
After Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) showed the secretary videos of citizens being violently dragged out of their homes and cars in arrests by agents without judicial warrants, Noem defended the agency’s practice, which experts have said violates the constitutional protection against unlawful search and seizure.
Other questions she evaded. When Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) asked her point-blank if she believed Good and Alex Pretti, whom ICE agents "shot in the face and killed," were "domestic terrorists" as Noem and others in the Trump administration claimed without evidence, the secretary repeatedly refused to correct the record, as ICE's acting director Todd Lyons did during a hearing last month.
Following Wednesday's hearing, Jayapal said Noem's responses "only further cemented my belief that she needs to resign, be fired, or be impeached."
"She refused to accept responsibility for the actions of ICE and [Customs and Border Protection], for the arrests of US citizens, for the deaths of 40 immigrants in ICE custody, for the kidnapping and the disappearances of children like Liam Ramos, and for the killings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good in the streets of Minnesota," Jayapal said. "It is a terrible shame that she could not do any of that."
Noem's appearance on Capitol Hill comes as DHS has been partially shut down for nearly three weeks, with Democrats demanding reforms to the agency's conduct in exchange for full funding.
Republicans have thus far refused to budge on demands that agents obtain judicial warrants before entering homes and private spaces, stop wearing masks to conceal their identities, and rein in the practice of “roving patrols” that have often taken the form of indiscriminate arrests rife with racial profiling.
She said Noem's testimony also affirmed her belief that "DHS, ICE, and CBP need to be dismantled."
"There is no reason for them to operate in this way with zero accountability and no way to ensure that they actually protect our residents rather than terrorize them," Jayapal said. "That is why I have refused to give another cent to these agencies without significant reforms."
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The Supreme Court's Pro-Trump Immigration Rulings Threaten Decades of Progress
The sitting members should consider what kind of legacy they wish to leave for future generations before siding blindly with our most autocratic president in history.
Feb 18, 2026
The justices on the Supreme Court should not favor the president who appointed them because checks and balances demand that they uphold the law without passion or prejudice. The current Supreme Court has increasingly shown a pattern of siding with the Trump administration—a result made predictable by the court’s conservative majority. Immigration cases have, with rare exception, aligned along these partisan lines.
On June 27, 2025, the Supreme Court sidestepped the question of birthright citizenship and overruled lower court decisions that sought to protect it. The original plaintiffs filed suit to enjoin the enforcement of the executive order that identifies circumstances in which a person born in the United States is not “subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” thereby restricting the constitutionally guaranteed bestowal of birthright citizenship. The Trump administration petitioned the Supreme Court, which granted review. The plaintiffs argued that the executive order violates the 14th Amendment’s Citizenship Clause, as well as sections 1 and 201 of the Nationality Act of 1940—the constitutional guarantee that birth on US soil confers citizenship.
Before the case reached the Supreme Court, the district court entered universal injunctions barring the application of the executive order to anyone, thereby preserving birthright citizenship, and the appellate court denied the government’s request to postpone the granted relief. In its application to the Supreme Court, the government argued that federal courts lacked equitable authority to issue universal injunctions under the Judiciary Act of 1789, attacking the district court’s authority in order to preserve the president’s propensity to overstep his. The Supreme Court granted the government's application and held that Congress has not granted federal courts authority to universally enjoin the enforcement of an executive order. Reaching all the way back to pre-Revolution English law and the Founding Fathers, the Supreme Court reasoned that no such authority exists. Their reasoning reads as petulant and arbitrary, an invocation of ancient doctrine to narrow modern rights.
On September 8, 2025, the Supreme Court granted an application for stay by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The decision states that the Immigration and Nationality Act authorizes immigration officers to interrogate any alien (or person believed to be an alien) as to “his right to be or to remain in the United States.” They also found that they may briefly detain individuals if they have a “reasonable suspicion” that he or she is an alien illegally present in the United States, based on the “totality of the particular circumstances.”
The Supreme Court’s deep bias in favor of Trump administration policies gestures toward a reversal, through immigration cases, of the trenchant progress in civil rights litigation that the Warren Court and subsequent courts have made.
The Supreme Court’s interpretation of the law, however, takes tremendous liberties with the letter of these laws, essentially recognizing ethnicity as a basis for reasonable suspicion. Specifically, the California District Court enjoined immigration officers from making investigative stops based on, among other factors, speaking Spanish or English with an accent, and race or ethnicity. In a nutshell, the lower court forbade immigration enforcement from racially profiling Latine Angelenos. The Supreme Court overruled the lower court, reasoning that, while ethnicity alone cannot furnish reasonable suspicion, it can be a relevant factor when considered along with other salient factors. This argument is internally incoherent and contradictory, suggesting that racial bias is at once insufficient and persuasive evidence. Citing the myriad “significant economic and social problems” caused by “illegal” immigration, the Supreme Court sided with DHS, finding that the government would suffer irreparable injury from the injunction. The relevance of socioeconomic problems to the question of racial profiling and potential excessive force in the execution thereof is tenuous at best.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote the dissenting opinion, in which Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson joined. She argued that “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,“ as it would be a loss to our constitutional freedom.
On December 23, 2025, however, the Supreme Court issued an noticeably restrained opinion upholding a lower court’s temporary restraining order (TRO), which barred the deployment of the National Guard in Illinois. The court found that, under the Posse Comitatus Act, the military is prohibited from executing the laws, except in cases and under circumstances expressly authorized by the Constitution or Act of Congress. The decision further stated that, before the president can federalize the guard under 10 USC §12406(3), he must have statutory or constitutional authority to execute the laws with the regular military and must be unable with those forces to perform that function.
The Supreme Court’s deep bias in favor of Trump administration policies gestures toward a reversal, through immigration cases, of the trenchant progress in civil rights litigation that the Warren Court and subsequent courts have made. The sitting members should consider what kind of legacy they wish to leave for future generations before siding blindly with our most autocratic president in history. Political expediency may be convenient in the short term, but history will judge harshly those who twisted our most sacred liberties to the advantage of an advantageous few, rather than standing with the people our Constitution was written to protect.
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