Draft:Kavanaugh Stop

• Comment: Potentially could be merged into an article on the actual court case itself? Carolina2k22 • (talk) 12:12, 25 October 2025 (UTC)

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A Kavanaugh stop in the United States allows immigration officers to briefly detain a person based on a person’s “apparent ethnicity” as a “relevant factor” when deciding whether to arrest or detain them. Previously, when immigration officers stop and search a pedestrian, they were prohibited from considering physical appearance and language use, among other factors, when deciding to stop and question people about possible immigration law violations. Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s separate concurrence in Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo suggests that the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution permits race-based immigration policing, otherwise colloquially known as "racial profiling." The Fourth Amendment allows government officials to briefly stop and question someone without first obtaining a warrant based on “reasonable suspicion” that the person is engaging in illegal activity. The official “must be able to point to specific and articulable facts which, taken together with rational inferences from those facts, reasonably warrant that intrusion.”

In a dissenting opinion, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, wrote that the court’s order permits government officials to target people who “look a certain way, speak a certain way, and appear to work a certain type of legitimate job that pays very little."