Ian Millhiser

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.

They took out the injunction.

They put the injunction on hold.

And while the full court did not explain itself, Justice Brett Kavanaugh did.

And part of his argument went back to this 1980s era decision called City of Los Angeles v. Lyons.

The facts of Lyons are very tragic.

There is a man who was choked out, or at least allegedly choked out, by a Los Angeles Police Department officer.

And what the Supreme Court said is that he cannot get an injunction preventing the LAPD from choking people unless he could show that he personally is likely to be choked by an L.A.

police officer again.

So here again, there used to be some very serious protections against law, at least federal law enforcement abuse, and they basically no longer exist.