Main: Video recorded by another construction crew shows Leo Venegas on May 21, 2025, being detained by immigration officers as he says he’s a U.S. citizen (Institute for Justice). Right inset: Justice Brett Kavanaugh speaks at a panel at the Eighth Circuit Court Judicial Conference on Thursday, July 31, 2025, in Kansas City, Mo. (AP Photo/Nick Ingram).
The chief judge of a federal court in Alabama said he was “not inclined” to take the Trump administration’s “word for it” on Monday while siding with a construction worker who was detained multiple times on the job by immigration officers, despite having his REAL ID and proclaiming “I’m a citizen!”
When Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh issued a stay on the shadow docket in the case Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo just over one year ago, allowing the administration to continue conducting roving ICE raids, he downplayed the potential for abuses and worse.
The government, Kavanaugh said, “sometimes makes brief investigative stops to check the immigration status of those who gather in locations where people are hired for day jobs; who work or appear to work in jobs such as construction, landscaping, agriculture, or car washes that often do not require paperwork and are therefore attractive to illegal immigrants; and who do not speak much if any English.”
Shortly after, Drexel University School of Law Professor Anil Kalhan created the term “Kavanaugh stop” to describe instances of the Department of Homeland Security and its immigration agents claiming “reasonable suspicion” and detaining people based on their perceived race or ethnicity, their line of work, the job site they were at, and their accent or inability to speak English.
The term has stuck, so much so that Justice Sonia Sotomayor ripped Kavanaugh in public — but not by name — as someone who “probably doesn’t really know any person who works by the hour.” Sotomayor apologized a week later for the “inappropriate” and “hurtful” remarks.
In a twist, however, the “Kavanaugh stop” opinion on Monday helped Leonardo Garcia Venegas, a Spanish-speaking construction worker in Baldwin County, Alabama, who “has already been seized during two separate warrantless raids, on two different construction sites 20 miles apart, while doing his job” even though he had a REAL ID-compliant state ID and is a U.S. citizen.
Chief U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Beaverstock, a Trump appointee overseeing the class-action case, pointed out that Kavanaugh also said “reasonable suspicion means only that immigration officers may briefly stop the individual and inquire about immigration status” and “[i]f 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.”
That’s not what happened in this case, the judge said, as the agents would not take “a STAR ID that complies with the REAL ID Act” for an answer.
“The record also reflects that Venegas was not promptly released following the production of his REAL ID to officers. Instead, the officers disregarded the veracity of his documentation and continued to detain him,” the order said. “A policy that permits such action is likely to run afoul of the Fourth Amendment.”
“The Court is simply not inclined to take the Government’s word for it,” the judge also said in response to DHS claiming it had “reasonable suspicion” to stop Venegas again on June 12, 2025. “With regard to that instance, the Government acknowledges that it has no information whatsoever of the detainer, but still argue that the agents had ‘reasonable suspicion’ to detain Venegas based on their training and experience.”
As a result, the judge issued a temporary stay of three DHS policies at issue in the lawsuit: a “Warrantless Entry Policy (permitting immigration officers to raid private construction sites without a warrant or consent)”; a “Preemptive Detention Policy (permitting immigration officers to preemptively detain employees without a particularized suspicion that persons are illegal immigrants)”; and a “Continued Detention Policy (permitting immigration officers to continue detaining workers even after they show evidence of citizenship or lawful presence).”
On the latter, Beaverstock emphasized Kavanaugh’s concurrence “bolsters Plaintiff’s position with respect to this policy.”
“Again, the Government’s position that valid proof of citizenship such as a Real ID is not enough, undermines its position that it does not have a policy of continued detainer of individuals after a valid proof of citizenship has been produced,” a footnote explained.
The Institute for Justice, which represents Venegas, shared a statement from the plaintiff on the immediate effect of the ruling.
“For the first time in a long time, I will be able to go to work without worrying that I will be arrested for no reason,” he said. “Americans cannot be stopped and held by law enforcement when they are doing nothing wrong.”
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