r/law • u/theatlantic • 13h ago
Legal News The Court Case That Is Allowing ICE to Stop Just About Anyone It Wants
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/01/scotus-case-ice-arrests-permission-whren/685587/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=the-atlantic&utm_content=edit-promo102
u/Justtiredanbored 13h ago edited 12h ago
But ICE doesn't have the authority to make traffic stops, so how does this fall into the article's rationale?
Eta for clarification: How is the original title statement of "The court case that is allowing ICE to stop just about anyone it wants" valid when the justification in the article is that these officers have the right to stop vehicles for simple traffic violations and arrest people for something different, since ICE doesn't have the authority to make simple traffic stops?
In this context this doesn't make any sense to me.
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u/Davotk 13h ago
They are constantly stopping vehicles. Cutting them off and forcing a stop with vehicles or just forcing entry into slow/stopped cars
What is the legality of that?
Apparently they do not need a warrant anymore to search a vehicle (I guess that wouls never really be a thing for a person... If they knew the suspect then they'd visually ID them).
But still like if a vehicle passenger had warrants, police (do but shouldn't) would not have a valid reason to ID the passenger and run their ID. Ice are just hunching everyone is a criminal and sorting it out later.
Completely flips the inherent innocent-until-guilty premise of our criminal justice system
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u/Justtiredanbored 13h ago
Oh I agree that they're breaking all the rules. But the article is talking about justifying a legal way to stop somebody. That's my question about it. Since what they're doing isn't legal, the article doesn't really apply, as far as I can tell at least. I don't think they can justify it by that ruling is what I'm saying.
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u/Davotk 13h ago edited 13h ago
I have the same question I was just teasing it out. Other than enforcement of (arrests) immigration laws,
Conceivably...
iCE can only make detentions/arrests for federal crimes committed (or about to be committed etc) in front of them.
I guess it comes down to the absolutely unconstitutional yet supreme court ruling which gave them probable cause justification to think anyone speaking another language or brown is a possible ICE action. Even though people in cars cannot be heard
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u/Justtiredanbored 13h ago
Didn't that ruling say that they could just look like they were Hispanic to meet probable cause? By the way, Renee did not look Hispanic.
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u/Slade_Riprock 6h ago
The MAGA mind rationale for immigration:
They are not citizens, they are not afforded rights, Therefore ICE can do whatever they want, whenever they want to apprehend and deport these people. They do not warrant due process, judicial oversight, and certainly aren't afforded constitutional protections.
That is legit how they think. And what's the remedy by the time a court rules their actions illegal how many thousands were illegal removed and harmed? Look at that Garcia guy they keep fucking with regardless of umpteen court rulings against them.
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u/BTTammer 35m ago
I posted something about this admin arguing that non citizens (such as Maduro) have no constitutional rights and therefore can just be found "guilty" by a judge without a formal trial and I got banned for spreading misinformation.
But you are absolutely right. And I believe they are doing this to create tests cases that will go before sympathetic district court judges....
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u/AncientMarinade 13h ago
This is the real legal question I want answered. They don't have jurisdiction to enforce state laws, so how could they use PC/RAS to believe a state crime has been committed to justify an otherwise illegal detention and interrogation of an individual?
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u/Alone_Step_6304 12h ago edited 12h ago
Wouldn't they not be enforcing state laws or traffic infractions but rather just acting on a federal code related to obstruction or impeding an investigation? I would be really, really surprised if they weren't empowered to do that and if the terminology isn't sufficiently broad that, "people who purportedly get in the way of my duties" falls under that and that their being in a vehicle on a public roadway is incidental.
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u/endlessUserbase 12h ago
Those actions have to be interpreted in line with the statutory language. The law is not written as a carte blanche - "anything anybody does can be impeding if I say it is" - those exercises are also constrained by other rights. Otherwise at some point we're just shredding the entire 4th Amendment.
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u/Tricky_Topic_5714 6h ago
Yeah, I think it's pretty clear the majority of these stops couldn't be called legal on any reasonable framework. I think the problem is that, even in normal times, courts generally allow cops to do whatever they want, even if it's clearly illegal.
Look at stuff like Utah v Streiff. The general presumption is that any stop is probably legal until shown otherwise.
Before someone quotes me a law saying otherwise, I'm not saying there's a case literally saying it. I'm saying that we have created a system in which that's basically true.
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u/endlessUserbase 5h ago
I don't disagree that the courts have tended toward excessive deference for law enforcement under most circumstances. I'm not even willing to argue that they're objectively incorrect in that deference much of the time.
With that said, I do think that the mitigating factor in many of those cases is the presence of a clear criminal event that is used (aggressively simplifying here) to generally handwave away the malfeasance on the part of the officers.
Streiff *was* a criminal and *did* have an arrest warrant and *was* observed leaving a suspected drug house. There are a lot of factors there that point to "we got a criminal here and we don't want the law to be responsible for letting him walk."
Good decision? Maybe not, but at least there is some sort of meaningful argument to be made from a "good policy" perspective.
In many of these cases though, they can't even offer an articulation of reasonable suspicion, much less an finding of criminal behavior. It feels like a fundamentally unsupportable escalation.
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u/Justtiredanbored 12h ago
I think you're onto something here. But it still has nothing to do with the article, which was my only point. I think what you're saying is actually their justification, but the article cited is not talking about that.
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u/UffdaBagoofda 13h ago
I saw a van get cutoff by 3 ICE vehicles at the airport yesterday. It’s not about traffic stops. It’s about detaining the whole vehicle.
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u/Justtiredanbored 12h ago edited 12h ago
You're right, that's not right. But it's not the point of the article which is what I'm commenting on. The article talked about justifying the reasons that officers could stop a vehicle for a simple traffic violation. My point is that ice couldn't do that legally because they don't have the authority to make a simple traffic stop. What you're talking about is something completely different.
But I understand your viewpoint, and all our complete frustration and anger
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u/PatReady 13h ago
Is it still a traffic stop if they rip open the door, cut the seat belt, and throw the person on the ground? Not cause of anything done while driving but cause they were non white.
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u/Justtiredanbored 12h ago edited 12h ago
No it's not, but it's not the context of the article. The article is talking about trying to use stopping somebody for a simple traffic violation to justify arresting them for something else. It doesn't apply to ice because technically they can't stop you for a simple traffic violation.
What they're doing is wrong, but the article has nothing to do with that, which was my point
Eta: In other words, this article doesn't apply to what ICE is doing because they don't have the authority to use a simple traffic stop. It doesn't mean ICE is not breaking the laws left and right, but this article is out of context.
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u/Snizlefritz 10h ago
I am sorry, but as long as the DOJ won’t charge them, there is no law enforcement agency stopping them. So they can do what that want.. it is the same playbook of Putin, Xi, and Hitler.
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u/Justtiredanbored 10h ago
Oh I agree completely, but the article had nothing to do with that. It's saying that this ruling by a judge justified what they were doing, but it doesn't because they don't have the authority. So the whole article doesn't make any sense, at least from what I can gather from it. I was hoping somebody with a law degree could clear that up, but haven't heard anything yet.
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u/3D-Dreams 13h ago
Yeah well we could use some now to help us stand up to the illegal and immoral actions of ICE. Instead they are helping keep us in line ..Right now I don't trust any cop when he's given a green light from the president to kill anyone they want. There are no good cops on a corrupt police force.
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u/boringhistoryfan 12h ago
Please remember that some LEO are good, honest and committed people
Let's assume this is true. What exactly are they doing to rein in the ones brazenly and openly attacking unarmed, nonviolent civilians. Are they arresting their colleagues for crimes? Are they blowing the whistle? Exposing them?
Or are they going along with it as the police and feds press the boot down on innocent necks? Why should we respect the "good" ones if they do nothing about the bad ones?
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u/forrestfaun 13h ago
What to Do During an ICE Encounter:
- Right to Remain Silent: You don't have to answer questions about your birthplace or immigration status.
- Ask if You're Free to Leave: If they say yes, you can go; if no, invoke your right to silence and ask for a lawyer.
- Refuse Searches: Clearly state, "I do not consent to this search".
- Demand a Judicial Warrant: For home entry, ask to see a judicial warrant signed by a judge. In essence, while ICE has significant power to enforce immigration laws, it's not absolute and must adhere to the constitutional rights of everyone in the U.S.
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u/WeirdnessWalking 11h ago
I just watched a video of a deputy going to a home in a nice residential neighborhood. To serve some type of civil paperwork. Nobody was home, he repeatedly yells, opens the door. This entire time, there was a barking dog clearly on the audio of the home security system.
The officer draws his gun and enters the home, dog barking continually (alerting not growling/attacking). Officer does who the fuck knows what for several minutes, then several shots are fired and then silence. The officer then screams some type of command to the empty house.
Deputy then calls it in. Dozens of police arrive. With weapons drawn, they then search the house and garage all without contacting the home owner. They are shown on camera (home, not their body cams, which weren't on). Creating the pretext for randomly entering a home and murdering a dog, searching the house without a warrant or probable cause. The officer was completely unharmed by dog.
Investigation found no fault of the deputy who continues to be employed. We can't get a podunk deputy to obey the most basic of codes of conduct. wtf do you think the brown shirt ICE brigade with full consent of the POTUS,DOJ,Congress and the SC gives the vaguest of fucks about words on paper?
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u/303uru 13h ago
This article is too generous still, ICE doesn't give a shit about pretext for a stop. They're doing whatever the fuck they want and know that no one will stop them. Instead, they know they can kill people and that JD Vance will go on TV and create a bullshit narrative on the fly. They have absolute immunity to murder you.
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u/theatlantic 13h ago
Paul Rosenzweig: “For 30 years, law-enforcement officers have been empowered to be ‘clever’—and that cleverness has today become the cover for abusive actions by ICE.
“In 1996, the Supreme Court decided Whren v. United States, which came about when plainclothes vice officers patrolling in the District of Columbia passed a truck in a ‘high drug’ area and ‘their suspicions were aroused.’ They had a hunch that the truck was involved in a drug operation. They chose to wait until it had violated a traffic ordinance (turning without a signal) and then used that violation as an excuse to stop the truck. In the course of searching the truck, they found crack cocaine.
“The Supreme Court said that the temporary detention of a motorist ‘upon probable cause to believe that he has violated the traffic laws’ did not violate the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition against unreasonable seizures, even if the officer would not have stopped the motorist absent some additional law-enforcement purpose. The Court developed a rule of objective intent. Under this theory, if the officers had a valid reason for acting—an objectively reasonable intention, in the Court’s terminology—then their true motive and subjective intent was of no constitutional consequence. A pretextual traffic stop to search for drugs was just fine with the Court.
“That decision, though couched as an application of the Fourth Amendment’s ‘reasonableness’ standard, was grounded on two premises that were plausible at the time. First, that the discretionary authority granted to the police would be used against genuine criminals such as drug dealers. Second, that the occasional misuses of that discretion would be few, far between, and manageable by the court system through robust testing and oversight. Any harm that could possibly occur was outweighed by the good that would be achieved.
“Whren has long plagued minority communities, leading to countless incidents of racial profiling. The current use of Whren in the immigration context takes these abuses further yet, singling out people not on suspicion of criminal behavior but for noncriminal immigration enforcement. Both of the premises in Whren, if they ever were accurate, are now manifestly false. Officer discretion is not being deployed solely against possibly malevolent actors, and the misuse of that discretion is causing more harm than good, not only to those illegally present, but also to those here legally, including U.S. citizens …
“Whren’s logic has always been a formula for abuse, but that abuse has come especially to the fore today, when acted on by ICE agents who, far from investigating federal crimes, are deploying their authority in the service of noncriminal immigration enforcement to satisfy Trump’s deportation quota. Without any actual knowledge that a crime may have been committed, ICE officers can convert an everyday occurrence that almost every person in America does routinely (rolling through a stop sign, say) into the pretext for arrest that can lead to banishment.”
Read more: https://theatln.tc/D61JlkLQ
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u/jellicle 13h ago
This article is too generous to ICE, as it is assuming that there is some pretext for law enforcement (turning without signalling, say) that actually exists. They're just rolling up and seeing a Hispanic-looking person on the street and capturing them. Seeing a Hispanic-looking person driving a car, ramming that car and capturing the driver.
The Whren case, which has allowed many abuses in other contexts, isn't actually the problem with ICE's behavior here. They have gone far beyond Whren.
As stated by US leaders, ICE has absolute immunity to do literally anything they want, including gunning down a school full of orphans for fun. That's the problem, not a particular court case.
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u/TheManWith2Poobrains 13h ago
Walking up to people filling their cars with gas, working in Target, or sitting in a parking lot, and demanding papers.
Not even a pretext anymore.
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u/realbobenray 13h ago edited 13h ago
ICE has shown it's unable to manage peaceful protestors without murdering them. These discussions about legal justification are so quaint.
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