Aided by the Supreme Court and the insidious “Kavanaugh stop,” the administration’s cruel and chaotic mass deportation operations are sweeping up Americans – including children and U.S. military veterans
In last month’s shadow docket ruling giving the green light to racial profiling by federal immigration agents, Supreme Court Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh insisted that any wrongful targeting of U.S. citizens by ICE would prove nothing more than a mild inconvenience. Think something along the lines of a restaurant forgetting your side order of french fries. Annoying, sure, but something that can be resolved quickly.
“If the officers learn that the individual they stopped is a U. S. citizen or otherwise lawfully in the United States, they promptly let the individual go,” Kavanaugh claimed in his concurrence. He repeats this several times. “If the person is a U.S. citizen or otherwise lawfully in the United States, that individual will be free to go after the brief encounter,” he wrote on page six. “Moreover, as for stops of those individuals who are legally in the country,” Kavanaugh continued on page nine, “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 U.S. citizens or otherwise legally in the United States.”
This claim, however, is now “looking sillier by the day,” as Madiba K. Dennie notes at Balls and Strikes. Just look at last week’s appalling immigration raid targeting a neighborhood in Chicago. The federal government treated this residential building as if it were an active war zone, with federal agents from ICE, Border Patrol, the FBI, and the AFT “rappelling from helicopters onto rooftops and breaking down doors” and ransacking apartments in order to drag senior citizens, parents, and children – “some of them naked,” the Chicago Sun Times reported – from their beds and homes in the middle of the night.
Unsurprisingly, American citizens were not spared from the havoc of this military-style raid. Nor was their experience in custody of immigration officials anything like the mild inconvenience promised by Kavanaugh. Some legal observers have since dubbed this unjust detention of American citizens a “Kavanaugh stop.”
“67-year-old Roderick Johnson, a U.S. citizen, ‘said agents broke through his door and dragged him out in zip ties,’” Judd Legum reports at Popular Information. “After telling agents he was a citizen, Johnson was told he ‘had to wait until they looked me up.’ His requests to see a search warrant or speak to a lawyer were ignored. Johnson ‘was left tied up outside the building for nearly three hours before agents finally let him go.’” In addition to the attack on Mr. Johnson, four U.S. citizen children were also taken into custody and separated from their detained parents, Reuters reported.
Ebony Sweets Watson, a resident of the neighborhood, “said she saw agents dragging residents, including kids, out of the building without any clothes on and into U-Haul vans,” WBEZ reported. “Kids were separated from their mothers, she said.”
This chaos has not been isolated to major American cities where the administration is engaged in the political targeting of perceived enemies. In Alabama, U.S. citizen Leo Garcia Venegas has been subjected to racial profiling and detention by federal immigration agents not once, but twice while working construction jobs.
“Leo specializes in laying concrete foundations for homes being built in fast-growing Baldwin County, Alabama,” the Institute for Justice said. “On May 21, he was working on a new home when masked federal agents jumped a fence and ran toward fellow workers.” Garcia Venegas began to record the arrests – as is his legal right – when agents then turned their sights on him. When Garcia Venegas tried to prove his identity by showing federal agents his REAL ID, they dismissed it as a fake and kept him detained, releasing him only after they bothered to run his Social Security number.
But this wasn’t the end of the story. Just a few weeks later, agents again harassed Garcia Venegas while he was at work, and for a second time accused him of faking his REAL ID.
“With one armed agent in front and another behind, Leo was marched to the edge of the development and held with other detained Latino construction workers, including at least two who were also legally in the country,” the Institute for Justice continued. “After 20 minutes of this baseless detention, agents released Leo and the other two documented workers.” Garcia Venegas has since filed a class action lawsuit against the federal government, seeking a halt to “unconstitutional and illegal immigration enforcement tactics in the Southern District of Alabama.” He’s also “submitted claims to the federal agencies who violated his rights, announcing his intent to sue under the Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA),” the Institute for Justice continued.
“Armed and masked federal officers are raiding private construction sites in Alabama, detaining whoever they think looks undocumented, and ignoring proof of citizenship,” said Institute for Justice attorney Jared McClain. “That’s unconstitutional, and this case seeks to bring that practice to an end.”
Other Americans have also bravely stood up in the courts to fight the federal government’s civil rights violations including a 15-year-old teen who was held at gunpoint outside a Los Angeles school this past summer.
“The teen was forcefully restrained and apprehended by agents with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and U.S. Border Patrol, according to the claim filed Aug. 25 with both agencies, as well as the U.S. Department of Homeland Security,” The Sacramento Bee reported. The report notes that federal agents had the boy cuffed for about seven minutes before releasing him. But there was no apology or inkling of regret from the federal agents.
“Oh, we just confused you with somebody else, but look at the bright side, like, you’re going to have an exciting story to tell your friends when you go back to school,” the agents reportedly told him. “There’s nothing exciting about getting guns pointed at you,” his mother later said, “especially when you’re a 15-year-old, you don’t know what’s going on, you’re scared and there’s nothing exciting about that.” Nor was it exciting for U.S. citizen Javier Ramirez, who was racially profiled and thrown to the ground while working at his job at L.A. City Junk Cars in Montebello in June. “Get him, he’s Mexican,” agents reportedly said. In an op-ed at The San Francisco Chronicle, disabled U.S. military veteran George Retes also described his pleas being ignored after he was taken into custody by immigration agents. He was detained for three days.
“I missed my daughter’s third birthday party. Then I was just let go, with no charges, no explanation for why and no apology,” he wrote. “This isn’t just my story. It’s a warning. Because if it can happen to me, it can happen to any one of us.”
CNN: Is it the case that you are profiling brown people?STEPHEN MILLER: What a dumb question
Top administration officials were claiming as recently as Monday that racial profiling was not only a baseless allegation to launch against the federal government, but a laughable one as well. During a cable news interview, mass deportation architect-in-chief Stephen Miller laughed when he was asked if brown people were being profiled. “What a dumb question,” he replied. Notice he didn’t deny the claim. His troopers, however, have been much more forthcoming.
“Gregory Bovino, the officer in charge of roving immigration enforcement in American cities, admitted this week that his agents arrest people based on ‘how they look,’” Slate reported October 1. “Asked by a WBEZ reporter to elaborate, Bovino said the pertinent question was how ‘they’ appear as ‘compared to’ the reporter, a white man. Bovino’s candor stripped away any pretense: Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents are detaining individuals because they look Latino.”
Following public scrutiny of his remarks, Bovino tried to claim that WBEZ took his comments out of context. So WBEZ pulled out the receipts. And since then, Trump has defended “use of the U.S. military against the ‘enemy within,’” NPR reported. Not only is this agenda antithetical to our values as a nation, it’s actually making us less safe. “FBI agents reassigned to round up immigrants have had to walk away from investigations into violent predators who target and exploit children online,” MSNBC recently reported.
Some of the recent data from the report has revealed that the administration has pulled more than 2,800 agents from crime-fighting investigations in order to focus on mass deportations. That has included pulling agents from their investigation of members of 764, a “nihilistic violent extremist” group that coerces vulnerable children “to post graphic sexual imagery of themselves and then blackmails them to post more imagery, including images of self-harm.”
@durbin.senate.gov said it clearly: the DOJ is making America less safe.Instead of going after organized crime, AG Bondi shut down a key task force to fuel this administration’s mass deportation agenda.
— America's Voice (@americasvoice.bsky.social) 2025-10-07T17:03:05.402Z
“It is clear that for this administration the ‘enemy within’ includes our neighbors and friends, moms, dads, and children, U.S. citizens and non-citizens alike,” responded America’s Voice Executive Director Vanessa Cárdenas. “Let this sink in, ICE came in the middle of the night to terrorize a community, knocking down doors and dragging people– including children– out of their beds. Let’s be clear – this is not what Americans voted for and families in American cities are not enemies within.”
“This mass deportation crusade is endangering the rights and safety of all Americans, traumatizing our children, and separating our families,” Cárdenas continued. “As a nation, we are better than having our government, in our name, inflicting such deliberate and hateful cruelty.”
