"Turn around or you're going to get the dog"

Fifty days since the “Kavanaugh stop” was authorized — although the practice certainly preceded the September 8 order.

The high court’s order blocked a temporary restraining order that had been issued in July by U.S. District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong in Los Angeles. Under the TRO, the Trump administration was simply barred from using only some combination of a person’s race or ethnicity, the fact that they speak Spanish or have an accent, and the type of work they do and where they were found to detain someone.

If there was more, even under the TRO, the administration could detain a person. But, if some combination of those factors was all that justified the administration’s suspicion, no detention was allowed under the TRO.

That was too much of a restriction on President Donald Trump’s executive branch for the Republican appointees of this Supreme Court, although Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas, Sam Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Amy Coney Barrett wrote nothing to explain themselves.

“The application for stay,” the court’s order simply stated, “is granted.”

Although all three Democratic appointees spoke out through a dissent written by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the only Republican appointee to write anything that day was Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

A privileged, white, East Coast elite lawyer who attended private schools and would not be subject to the law enforcement operation he was OK’ing, Kavanaugh, appointed to the Supreme Court by Trump in the president’s first term, provided an underwhelming and heavily criticized justification for the decision.

By being the only justice who supported the decision who wrote anything, he has — whether he wanted to or not — become the face of this racist decision.

Enter the “Kavanaugh stop.”

In one particularly indefensible sentence that followed, Kavanaugh simply pushed the Fourth Amendment to the wayside:

Although he went on to note that the issue before the court was not about the use of force, and that “remedies should be available in federal court“ for any “excessive force” because “the Fourth Amendment prohibits such action,“ that after-the-fact remedy — even if available — is not an answer.

As became abundantly clear in the weeks since.

“Turn around or you’re going to get the dog,“ Frank Miranda — a U.S. citizen born in California — was told by ICE agents in Portland on October 2.

According to a letter from a lawyer he later hired to represent him, Miranda was detained, put in cuffs, struck from behind, taken to an ICE facility, and eventually released with no explanation.