Short Circuit 418 | ICE Detention and Booze-Sniffing Dogs

About this episode

This episode discusses the legality of K-9 searches and recent ICE detention practices, featuring insights from Rob Frommer and Jaba Tsitsuashvili.

[Note: This episode was down for a couple days but has been reposted. It originally dropped on March 6, 2026.] If you’ve ever wondered if a sniff is a search, IJ’s Rob Frommer has you covered on this week’s episode. Well, he has you covered in explaining how the law is all over the place on the subject. Rob tells the story of a couple who were sleeping in their car in a Mississippi parking lot when a cop saw they had an empty bottle of Fireball whisky in the back. This quickly led to a K-9 dog sniff and a full search of the car which then led to a civil rights lawsuit. After that, Jaba Tsitsuashvili of IJ brings us another Fourth Amendment story, this one involving the ICE detentions and habeas petitions rolling across the country. A federal district judge in West Virginia had enough of the federal government’s unconstitutional tactics and wrote a fiery opinion lambasting ongoing violations of both the Constitution and immigration law. It was in the context of a specific detainee who was pulled over for having a plastic cover on his license plate. Jaba takes us through the opinion and the wider world of contemporary ICE tactics. Register for “The Other Declarations of 1776”…

People in this episode

Host: Rob Frommer

Guest: Jaba Tsitsuashvili

Topics covered

• ICE detention
• Fourth Amendment
• civil rights
• law enforcement
• K-9 searches
• habeas petitions

Keywords

• ICE detention
• Fourth Amendment
• civil rights lawsuit
• K-9 dog sniff
• habeas petitions
• law enforcement tactics

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Institute for Justice

Products: Fireball whisky

Places: Mississippi, West Virginia

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