The Supreme Court entered an order today staying an order by a Los Angeles district court that had imposed a broad injunction in how the Trump Administration can enforce the immigration laws. The Supreme Court's order itself has no reasoning, but Justice Kavanaugh wrote a concurrence in the judgment explaining his vote in support of the Court's order and Justice Sotomayor (joined by Justice Kagan and Justice Jackson) wrote a dissent explaining their votes against the Court's order.
Given that the underlying merits involve my area, the Fourth Amendment, I thought I would offer some tentative thoughts.
By way of context, the usual practice is that courts rarely enter injunctions in Fourth Amendment cases. Fourth Amendment law is just too fact-specific. What the police can and can't do is so dependent on the facts that it's hard for courts to carve out ahead of time a class of things the Fourth Amendment will not allow. This creates a problem for courts wanting to impose broad injunctive relief to prevent Fourth Amendment violations. It forces courts to either say something generic like "don't violate the Fourth Amendment" —something the Fourth Amendment already covers—or to try to come up with prophylactic rules to protect the underlying Fourth Amendment values even if it means enjoining some constitutional acts to prevent other unconstitutional ones.
