In a pair of recent legal developments, the Trump administration’s approach to immigration enforcement has come under renewed scrutiny, drawing sharp criticism from civil rights advocates and deep concern from members of the judiciary. The two cases, both decided in mid-September 2025, highlight the administration’s willingness to test the boundaries of existing law—and, some argue, to stretch those boundaries past their breaking point.
On September 15, the Supreme Court’s shadow docket delivered a consequential decision in Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo, a case centering on allegations of racial profiling by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Southern California. Justice Brett Kavanaugh, writing a lone concurrence, sided with the Trump administration’s expansive view of immigration enforcement powers. According to Slate, Kavanaugh accepted the administration’s assertion that “1 in every 10 residents of LA is an ‘undocumented immigrant,’” despite offering no statistical evidence for that claim. This assertion, as noted by human rights lawyer Ahilan Arulanantham, is not just unsupported—it ignores the complex realities of Los Angeles’s diverse population. “There just isn’t statistical evidence on how many undocumented people work in car washes or work as day laborers,” Arulanantham explained. “I’ve had clients who worked as day laborers and other work sites, there are citizens working alongside undocumented people in various jobs. It’s not a caste system.”
The case itself involved detailed factual findings by lower courts, which documented repeated ICE stops targeting Latino and Spanish-speaking individuals. In one instance, a car wash was raided multiple times, with both citizens and undocumented workers subjected to questioning. The district court judge and the Ninth Circuit agreed that these actions amounted to a pattern of discriminatory enforcement. Yet, as Arulanantham pointed out, “Brett Kavanaugh has some feelings. And his feelings are clear in his breezy characterization of what an encounter with a roving ICE patrol looks like.”
Kavanaugh’s concurrence argued that “reasonable suspicion means only that immigration officers may briefly stop the individual and inquire about immigration status. 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. Only if the person is illegally in the United States may the stop lead to further immigration proceedings.” Critics, however, argue that this glosses over the real-world impact of such stops, which often involve force or coercion and disproportionately target communities of color. The record in Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo described precisely these kinds of violations, yet Kavanaugh dismissed them as irrelevant to the legal question at hand.
Perhaps most controversially, Kavanaugh invoked the 1983 Supreme Court case Los Angeles v. Lyons to argue that plaintiffs lacked standing to challenge the ICE stops, even when those stops were repeated and clearly targeted specific groups. This precedent, originally used to limit lawsuits over police chokeholds, has long been criticized for making it nearly impossible for victims of systemic abuse to seek redress. As Arulanantham recounted, “The Supreme Court said [the plaintiff] couldn’t establish standing because he could not show that it was likely to happen to him again. Among the reasons the Supreme Court gave was the claim that you have to actually violate a traffic law to be pulled over. This is obviously implausible.”
In the current case, plaintiffs had been stopped multiple times, often at the same location, and the government had openly acknowledged its policy of targeting certain workplaces and neighborhoods. “Obviously you should be able to challenge that if it’s happened to you multiple times, and they have a policy, which you know is going to cause this to happen again,” Arulanantham said. Yet, Kavanaugh’s concurrence sidestepped these facts, instead relying on a narrow reading of standing that critics say effectively “greenlights racial profiling as part of the basis for reasonable suspicion.”
The implications of the decision are far-reaching. According to Slate, experts believe Kavanaugh’s reasoning expands what professor Aziz Huq has called the “prerogative state”—a legal regime in which vulnerable outsiders are subject to sweeping government power, often without meaningful recourse. “The prerogative state is ever-growing. The president just gets to do what he wants, and the Supreme Court is expanding the sphere of people who get swept into that kind of thinking,” Arulanantham warned. The plaintiffs in Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo included U.S. citizens, underscoring that the effects of these policies extend well beyond undocumented immigrants. “This isn’t just about immigration, this is about labor, and this is about how work happens in Southern California. It’s about this huge growth in the class of people for whom the law, as you and I understand it, just doesn’t apply.”
Compounding the uncertainty is the fact that the Supreme Court’s decision came via the so-called “shadow docket”—a process for issuing emergency orders without full briefing or oral argument. Only Kavanaugh authored an opinion, and the rest of the Court did not join him, leaving the legal status of his views in limbo. “The Supreme Court has suggested its opinions, even if on the shadow docket, are to be treated not as controlling, but informative. That’s what they say. Informative in like cases. But this is not an opinion, in Noem v. Vasquez-Perdomo, it’s only one justice talking. Presumably, if we’re doing law, if the others agreed with him, then they would’ve signed it. So then presumably this is not the law as to the subjects that are addressed, but then what is? Nobody knows.”
Just a day later, on September 16, another case underscored the Trump administration’s aggressive posture on deportations. As reported by Devdiscourse, U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan declared she was powerless to prevent the removal of four men detained in Ghana to countries where U.S. immigration judges had determined they faced the risk of torture or persecution. The deportations, carried out despite legal protections under the United Nations Convention Against Torture, marked a clear legal victory for the administration.
Judge Chutkan expressed “alarm and dismay” at the administration’s methods, noting the apparent circumvention of international and domestic prohibitions on deporting individuals to countries where they could be harmed. The case highlighted what critics, including the American Civil Liberties Union, describe as a pattern of evading legal safeguards for at-risk individuals. As Devdiscourse summarized, the administration’s actions “defy legal protections for at-risk individuals,” raising troubling questions about the future of humanitarian norms in U.S. immigration policy.
Taken together, these two cases paint a picture of an immigration enforcement regime that is both more expansive and less constrained by traditional legal checks than ever before. From the streets of Los Angeles to detention centers in Ghana, the Trump administration’s policies are reshaping the boundaries of the law—and, for millions of people, the very meaning of justice in America.
As the dust settles, lawyers, judges, and communities across the country are left grappling with a new reality: one in which the law’s protections are increasingly uncertain, and the reach of government power seems to grow with each passing decision.
