Ostensibly, Washington, is flooded with federal military personnel and agents because of how the city is besieged by violent crime. But Wednesday night’s traffic safety checkpoint nonsense looks a lot more like the Trump administration is using its takeover of the city to expand its immigration crackdown.
Beginning around 8 PM, over 20 law enforcement officers began stopping cars at a busy intersection in D.C. Though the traffic checkpoint was theoretically conducted by the Metropolitan Police Department, motorists were also greeted with Homeland Security Investigations agents and Enforcement and Removal Operations agents, the latter of which is part of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. ERO agents are the ones who arrest and remove undocumented immigrants. Must just be some crazy coincidence that what was supposed to be a checkpoint for things like busted taillights was staffed by overzealous masked federal agents with the power to detain immigrants.
As with all things in this administration, it’s not at all clear (1) what actually happened and (2) whether what happened is legal. MPD’s statement to the press about the checkpoint was that they’ve been doing traffic safety checkpoints since 2023, which is true. A police spokesperson said that 344 cars passed through the checkpoint, 28 vehicles were stopped, and 38 “infraction notices”—aka tickets—were issued.
That spokesperson omitted the part where the checkpoint also resulted in ICE arresting someone who had overstayed a tourist visa. And that’s where things get complicated and probably illegal.
By and large, police can’t stop vehicles for no reason. They need some sort of particularized, individualized suspicion that warrants stopping your car specifically. The exception to this, however, is checkpoints. With a checkpoint, the idea is that all cars are stopped at the checkpoint, and then examined briefly about things related to the reason for the checkpoint. So, for example, the Supreme Court has upheld DUI checkpoints where every driver is stopped, and though some states ban the procedure, D.C. allows it. But this wasn’t a DUI checkpoint.
Customs and Border Patrol is allowed to set up permanent checkpoints to check on immigration status near the border, but this isn’t that either, unless the nation’s capital has been significantly relocated. But the Supreme Court has ruled that generalized checkpoints with a primary purpose that isn’t traffic safety violations are illegal, because that’s just basically an attempt to conduct general crime-fighting activities without any justification as to why.
The exception to that is that checkpoints about roadway safety, like busted taillights are fine—which is what the MPD spokesperson is referring to the police having done routinely in the past. But what you can’t have is one where you just stop every car at random because they feel like it, and then investigate for any crime they think might apply.
The way you can tell that the Wednesday night checkpoint was out of pocket is that nobody will actually say what the purpose of the checkpoint was, or whether the ICE and HSI agents were allowed to ask people about their immigration status. The White House, unsurprisingly, won’t answer.
Having a huge show of immigration agent force at the checkpoint, though, certainly makes it look like this was really an attempt to stop cars to question people about citizenship and then arrest them, which, see above, is illegal at general checkpoints.
It isn’t just that the checkpoint was illegal—it’s also lazy. Police already have incredibly wide latitude to stop someone pretextually—as in you say you’re stopping someone because they didn’t use their turn signal, but you’ve actually been following them because you want to search the car for drugs. But that’s not a checkpoint stop.
Instead, that’s where you’re using a fake reason to mask the real, individualized reason you want to stop that particular car. So, if police were truly interested in fighting crime, they could use this absurd display of force to follow around anyone they want until there’s a missed turn signal or a roll-through stop or some minor infraction, and then still search the car for guns or whatever.
The presence of so many immigration officials at the checkpoint is also reflective of the MPD saying they will not be following the city’s sanctuary law and instead will share information with ICE, even for people not in custody … such as those at a traffic stop checkpoint, perhaps.
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That’s not hyperbole. Instead, it’s already happening. On Tuesday, a motorist was stopped for driving without a license, which normally in D.C. would mean they were given a ticket and released. Instead, they found out he had an ICE detainer and turned him over to ICE at the police station.
And of course, by Thursday night, things had accelerated to the point where the Department of Justice declared that it had the authority to appoint an emergency commissioner to take full control of the MPD. Friday morning, D.C. filed a lawsuit seeking a temporary restraining order.
Whatever this is, it certainly isn’t about making anyone in Washington, D.C., safer .
