Monster of 2025: Kavanaugh stops

The staff of Mother Jones is, once again, rounding up the heroes and monsters of the past year. This is a non-exhaustive and totally subjective list, giving our reporters a chance to write about something that brought joy, discontent, or curiosity. Happy holidays.

The return of President Donald Trump has ushered in a new era of violent attacks by immigration officials, upon citizens and noncitizens alike. In city after city, we’ve seen that—whether waiting for the bus, sleeping peacefully in your bed, or working at the car wash that you own—you can be seized, zip-tied, and detained because of the color of your skin.

This isn’t the law, nor is it constitutional. And, until September, this indiscriminate racial profiling lacked a pithy descriptor. But, thanks to the Supreme Court, which legitimized this new regime, we have a name for this government-sponsored terror: Kavanaugh Stops.

When the administration’s practice of racial profiling as part of its immigration enforcement operation in and around Los Angeles reached the Supreme Court this summer in Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo, Justice Brett Kavanaugh voted alongside his GOP-appointed colleagues to greenlight this racist policy. His colleagues hid their reasoning in uncanny silence. But Kavanaugh decided to pen an opinion, called a concurrence, defending his decision. He then released his defense to the public (even though no other justice would sign onto it).

The opinion argued that the administration’s decision to use race as one proxy for immigration status likely didn’t run afoul of the Fourth Amendment or the court’s precedents. But, to make these arguments, his concurrence contradicted both daily news reports and the evidence in the very case he was ruling on. Boldly, Kavanaugh let neither the law nor the truth stop him from writing many stupid sentences defending the indefensible.

It’s hard to pick the worst part of this nonsensical concurrence, so we might as well start at the beginning. Kavanaugh believes that the citizens and immigrants who were illegally detained likely could not sue because “what matters is the ‘reality of the threat of repeated injury.’” Somehow, Kavanaugh decided that the plaintiffs have “no good basis to believe that law enforcement will unlawfully stop them in the future based on the prohibited factors—and certainly no good basis for believing that any stop of the plaintiffs is imminent.”

This would certainly be news to Jose Viramontes, a US citizen and one of said plaintiffs, who had the car wash he owned raided by immigration agents four times in nine days. Each time Viramontes was questioned, and once he was hauled off to a warehouse while agents verified his citizenship. The government admitted in this case that it goes back to the same places over and over; so, if someone frequents a certain bus stop or workplace that has been raided, and they look Latino, they could be grabbed more than once. This is not rocket science.

Next, Kavanaugh wrote that the court should give little weight to the harms experienced by the plaintiffs because undocumented immigrants are lawbreakers anyway. “The interests of individuals who are illegally in the country in avoiding being stopped by law enforcement for questioning is ultimately an interest in evading the law,” he wrote. “That is not an especially weighty legal interest.”

Pause for a second to consider the danger of this logic.

There’s a reason we have warrants for searches and arrests (which ICE is illegally foregoing as it descends on cities). It’s the same reason there are rules about how to conduct a fair trial. Without them, we lose the bedrock principle of innocent until proven guilty. We lose the rule of law and our safety. Under Kavanaugh’s logic, we are a nation where the default for people of color is to show authorities their papers constantly. Kavanaugh is proposing an upside-down Constitution under which those who look nonwhite are guilty until proven innocent.

He forgets that the entire point of the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition on unreasonable searches and seizures is to preserve freedom for everyone. It’s not the conduct of the plaintiffs at issue here—it’s the conduct of law enforcement. Kavanaugh either fails to grasp this third-grade level point, or he just doesn’t think everyone deserves protection.

Inconveniently for him, not all the plaintiffs are undocumented, so his argument that not all people within the US deserve the perk of Constitutional rights doesn’t apply to US citizens. For these plaintiffs, Kavanaugh brushes off these violent stops as minor inconveniences: “Moreover, as for stops of those individuals who are legally in the country, 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 US citizens or otherwise legally in the United States.” 

There’s a reason this quickly became the most ridiculed line in his opinion: it’s obviously not true. Just ask plaintiff Jason Gavidia, who was slammed against a fence with his arm painfully twisted behind his back before he was able to give agents his Real ID, which they never returned to him. Or Rodrick Johnson, a US citizen, who was dragged from his apartment in zip ties in the middle of the night after agents broke down his door. Or José Escobar Molina, who was kidnapped off the street and shoved into a Suburban by plainclothes officers who didn’t even ask for his ID. When Molina told them he had papers, they responded, “Shut up, bitch! You’re illegal.” Go ahead and ask George Retes, a citizen and veteran, who the government held for three days without letting him make a single phone call. “I was on my way to work when ICE agents engulfed my car in tear gas, smashed my driver-side window, and pepper-sprayed my face,” Retes later wrote. “They dragged me out, threw me to the ground, and even while I was complying, one agent kneeled on my neck, and another kneeled on my back as others stood by and watched.” 

Within a month of Kavanaugh’s moronic opinion, ProPublica had located 170 citizens who had been “dragged, tackled, beaten, tased, and shot by immigration agents. They’ve had their necks kneeled on. They’ve been held outside in the rain while in their underwear. At least three citizens were pregnant when agents detained them.” About two dozen were detained for a day or more without being able to make a phone call. Many of these were the exact kind of stop that Kavanaugh and his colleagues endorsed.

Of course, it’s not just citizens and lawful residents who are the victims of the government’s unapologetic racial profiling. Though Kavanaugh himself seemed not to care about unlawful detainments of undocumented immigrants, you can still read about them, like the eight-year-old who “cried hysterically” when agents arrested her parents while she played in a fountain in Chicago’s Millennium Park. 

Two weeks after Kavanaugh’s opinion, immigration attorney Aaron Reichlin-Melnick shared José Escobar Molina’s story on Bluesky. Drexel Law professor Anil Kalhan reposted it with a proposal: “What we might refer to as a ‘Kavanaugh Stop.’”

“Brett Kavanaugh invoked ‘common sense’ when he sought to justify racial profiling in Vasquez Perdomo,” Kalhan told Mother Jones. “But it turns out that his notion of ‘common sense’ flies directly in the face of the ‘common sense’ of what people have experienced and seen in their own communities.”

The name stuck. Possibly to Kavanaugh’s chagrin, because in late December, he returned to the subject in a cryptic footnote in a different case. “Officers must not make interior immigration stops or arrests based on race or ethnicity,” he wrote in a concurrence on the question of Trump’s National Guard troop deployment to Chicago. It’s too little, too late. His concurrence in September greenlit racial profiling without saying race could be the sole factor for a stop. And the phrase had already entered the national discourse.

After circulating among court-watchers and lawyers, Democrats in Congress started using it. It’s here to stay.

As one of the votes that allowed this unconstitutional cruelty to continue, Kavanaugh earned it. But he also did the country a service. He showed just how disingenuous you have to be to green-light these racist stops. He embarrassed himself spectacularly. And inadvertently showed the entire broken nature of the court we have now.

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

I am too. It’s not anyone who would volunteer their own name to describe authoritarian muggings. But Kavanaugh did. Wondering who the monsters of the year are? Kavanaugh raised his hand and said: Pick me.