This afternoon, Rebecca Santana of the Associated Press reported that ICE has been breaking into homes under the authority provided by a secret memo of May 12, 2025, signed by the acting director of ICE, Todd Lyons, saying that federal agents do not need a judge’s warrant to force their way into people’s homes.
The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, one of the ten amendments that make up the Bill of Rights, says: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”
As Joyce White Vance of Civil Discourse notes, courts have always interpreted that amendment to mean that a judge must sign a warrant to allow law enforcement to break into a home. Now the Department of Homeland Security says it does not need such a judicial warrant, but can simply use an administrative warrant signed by an official at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) or ICE if immigrants believed to be inside a home have a final order of removal.
The legal training manual for DHS itself quotes a 1984 Supreme Court decision that “the ‘physical entry of the home is the chief evil against which the wording of the Fourth Amendment is directed.”
Immigration law specialist Aaron Reichlin-Melnick noted that this memo is a big deal: it is “the federal government conspiring in secret to subvert the Fourth Amendment.”
“Every American should be terrified by this secret ICE policy authorizing its agents to kick down your door & storm into your home,” [Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT)], wrote on social media.
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Senator Ruben Gallego (D-AZ), who at the beginning of 2025 was considered a moderate on immigration, wrote: “Yeah I am not voting to give whatever ICE has become more taxpayer money. It’s no longer an immigration enforcement arm of the US government.”