Vice President JD Vance defended a leaked Immigration and Customs Enforcement memo authorizing ICE agents to forcibly enter homes without a warrant, as critics accuse the memo of alleged violations of search and seizure protections enshrined in the Fourth Amendment.
Key facts
Vance told the press: “We talked about the different types of court orders that exist in our system,” adding: “Typically, in the immigration system, these are handled by administrative judges. “So, we’re talking about getting court orders from them.” Vance stated that the Trump administration understands that “you can enforce the country’s immigration laws by administrative order if you have an administrative order.”
Court orders are signed by judges and require probable cause to authorize the search of a home and the seizure of evidence or people, while administrative orders are signed by an agency official, such as an ICE field director or an immigration judge (appointed by the attorney general), to authorize an agent only to make an arrest or seizure. Administrative orders do not authorize the search of a home without consent, according to the National Immigration Law Center and the American Civil Liberties Union of North Carolina.
Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin told Forbes in an email that each person served with an administrative order had “full due process and a final deportation order from an immigration judge,” adding that the officers who issued the orders found probable cause.
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Crucial ideals
“Now I guess it’s possible that the courts will say ‘no’ and of course if the courts say ‘no’ we will follow that law,” Vance added.
Chief Critic
Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., on Wednesday called for congressional hearings on the ICE memo and said the policy was “illegal and morally repugnant,” noting that the administrative orders “do not rise to the level of a court order allowing entry into or around a home, as required by long-standing Fourth Amendment jurisprudence.”
Key background
The ICE memo, first reported by the Associated Press, has not been widely circulated in the agency despite being used to train new officers. The AP noted that new ICE employees and trainees have been instructed to follow the memo’s guidelines rather than written training materials that contradict recent policy. It is unclear how many home raids have been carried out under the administrative orders mentioned in the memo, as multiple reports in the past week have covered the forced entry of ICE agents into homes in Minnesota, where protests have erupted following the fatal shooting of Renee Good, 37, by a federal officer. One line of the memo mentions Texas as a state where ICE agents have relied on administrative orders to arrest people living in the United States without legal permission, adding that “targeted arrest operations” were conducted in judicial districts sympathetic to the Trump administration’s agenda of deporting people “in the event that a targeted person litigates their illegal arrest.”
This article was previously published by Forbes Us
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