ICE's Secret Plan to Gut the Fourth Amendment's Prohibition Against Warrantless Searches and Seizures and Kidnap People From Their Homes

A hallmark of the Trump administration’s occupation of Minnesota is federal immigration agents demanding to enter houses without a judicial warrant, including in one notorious case where they broke down the door of a Hmong immigrant who is a U.S. citizen. Now we find that this violation of the Fourth Amendment was a deliberate but secret policy.

The Associated Press reports:

Federal immigration officers are asserting sweeping power to forcibly enter people’s homes without a judge’s warrant, according to an internal Immigration and Customs Enforcement memo obtained by The Associated Press, marking a sharp reversal of longstanding guidance meant to respect constitutional limits on government searches.

The memo authorizes ICE officers to use force to enter a residence based solely on a more narrow administrative warrant to arrest someone with a final order of removal, a move that advocates say collides with Fourth Amendment protections and upends years of advice given to immigrant communities. …

New ICE hires and those still in training are being told to follow the memo’s guidance instead of written training materials that actually contradict the memo, according to the whistleblower disclosure. …

The memo is addressed to all ICE personnel. But it has been shown only to “select DHS officials” who then shared it with some employees who were told to read it and return it, Whistleblower Aid wrote in the disclosure.

One of the two whistleblowers was allowed to view the memo only in the presence of a supervisor and then had to give it back.

The fact that they kept this secret is how we know that they know it’s unconstitutional. The Fourth Amendment requires a judge to approve a warrant so that there is an independent check on executive power—whereas an “administrative warrant” is a permission granted by the executive to itself, with no outside check.

This is literally something Americans once fought a revolution over: the issuance of “writs of assistance,” general warrants that allowed searches without specific evidence of wrongdoing. The Founders banned this in the Fourth Amendment—until the Trump administration decided to ignore it.

The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.

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