A nonprofit legal group that supports whistleblowers says it has unearthed a disturbing, secretive U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement memo that authorizes federal agents to enter people’s homes without a judge’s warrant.
The Trump administration’s tactics have already begun mirroring the Nazi Gestapo — a fact even Trump-friendly podcaster Joe Rogan has evidently started to realize. The idea of ICE agents being authorized to enter homes at will and without a warrant only seems to make the comparison more apt.
The memo is being widely rebuked by civil rights experts and activists, as well as Democrats — some of whom appear to see it as further reason to halt ICE’s funding. That the rhetoric below, for example, is coming from Sen. Ruben Gallego, an Arizona Democrat who just last year voted to expand the Trump administration’s authority to wage its anti-immigrant crackdown, arguably demonstrates how ghastly, racist and unmistakably authoritarian this crackdown has become.
And that we know about this memo at all is due entirely to whistleblowers. Whistleblower Aid said two of their clients unearthed the memo, details of which the organization conveyed to the Senate. The group’s senior vice president and special counsel, David Kligerman, said in a news release:
No court has ever found that ICE agents have such legal authority to enter homes without a judicial warrant. This administration’s secretive policy advocates conduct that the Supreme Court has described as ‘the chief evil against which the wording of the Fourth Amendment is directed’ – that is the warrantless physical entry of a home. Kligerman also was quoted as saying the actions authorized by the memo are “precisely what the Fourth Amendment was created to prevent.” The Department of Homeland Security gave the following response to MS NOW regarding the memo: Every illegal alien who DHS serves administrative warrants/I-205s have had full due process and a final order of removal from an immigration judge. The officers issuing these administrative warrants also have found probable cause. For decades, the Supreme Court and Congress have recognized the propriety of administrative warrants in cases of immigration enforcement. I’ll let you be the judge of whether the scenes we have seen play out across the country — of ICE agents rounding up people, or killing them — suggest that the Trump administration cares at all about respecting people’s due process. Nonetheless, this newly revealed memo underscores the need to support whistleblowers, whose legal protections have been targeted by the Trump administration.
Ja’han Jones is an MS NOW opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog. 
