Overview
- Sonia Sotomayor, speaking Tuesday at the University of Kansas School of Law, criticized a colleague for calling immigration detentions “only temporary stops” and pointed to lost wages and other real harms for hourly workers.
- In a September concurrence accompanying an emergency Supreme Court order that paused lower-court limits on immigration sweeps, Brett Kavanaugh wrote that “apparent ethnicity” could be a relevant factor and described the encounters as brief investigative stops.
- Investigative reports from ProPublica and Slate say ICE and CBP adopted that language as a standard, with numerous detentions of Hispanic drivers and about 170 U.S. citizens reported in the weeks after the ruling.
- Local officials have echoed those concerns, with Minnesota police chiefs saying federal agents pulled over and harassed many of their own officers of color.
- Kavanaugh later issued a clarification that officers must not make interior stops or arrests based on race or ethnicity, but legal experts quoted in coverage said the damage-control fell short.