Ian Millhiser

Right.

I mean, the short answer to that is probably not.

And that is somewhat by design.

So there used to be several legal mechanisms that could be used to deal with police abuse or, you know, overreaching federal agencies.

But the Supreme Court has been chipping away or even taking away the most effective means to do so.

Okay.

So broadly speaking, I wrote a piece recently where I discussed five different ways that lawsuits could be used against an agency like ICE.

So let's start with the most obvious one, which is injunctions.

So the court isn't just saying you got to pay money because you did something bad in the past.

It's the court is ordering you to stop doing something that you have been doing.

This can be a very powerful way of checking the government, because if the government has a policy, you could potentially get an injunction saying that that policy needs to stop.

Well, I'll give you a very recent case that is very relevant to this conversation.

So the Trump administration sent a lot of ICE and other law enforcement personnel to Los Angeles.

The federal government is not leaving L.A.

And those personnel, a federal district judge found, were targeting a lot of individuals for, in some cases, unconstitutional reasons, like because of their race, were targeting them because of where they worked, were targeting them because they were in places where ICE believed that undocumented people frequently gather.

And the judge issued an injunction saying, stop doing that.

You can't arrest someone just because they're Latino.

You can't arrest someone just because they're standing outside of a Home Depot.

You have to have more than that as the basis of your arrest.

And this case went up to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court ruled.