Mark Joseph Stern
‪@mjsdc.bsky.social‬

It's important to name the tools of authoritarianism so we can identify and condemn them with precision. I'm glad we now have a term for ICE's openly racist, degrading immigration arrests: Kavanaugh stops.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/10/scotus-analysis-kavanaugh-stops-supreme-court-lawsuit.html

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.

ALT
1 October 2025 at 13:24