Secret Internal Memo Exposes the Scale of ICE’s Lawlessness
INSIDE: Renee Good ... Lisa Cook ... Hannah Natanson
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo.
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Details and tickets here for the Jan. 29 event in D.C. (TPM members should look out for a special discount code in your inboxes. Reach out to talk@talkingpointsmemo.com if you didn’t receive or can’t find it.)
What 4th Amendment?
A secret internal ICE memo dated May 12, 2025 gave unconstitutional guidance allowing federal agents to forcibly enter homes without judicial warrants to detain undocumented immigrants.
“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,” according to the AP, which first obtained the memo. It was a part of a whistleblower complaint to senators from two anonymous government officials.
DHS did not contest the authenticity of the memo, which was signed by Todd Lyons, the acting director of ICE. A DHS official told the NYT that “their understanding was that the idea was piloted in one or two locations earlier this year.” (It wasn’t clear if the official meant 2025 or 2026.)
The memo acknowledged that it was offering different legal guidance than DHS had given in the past:
Although the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has not historically relied on administrative warrants alone to arrest aliens subject to final orders of removal in their place of residence, the DHS Office of the General Counsel has recently determined that the U.S. Constitution, the Immigration and Nationality Act, and the immigration regulations do not prohibit relying on administrative warrants for this purpose.
Administrative warrants are barely worth the paper they’re printed on. In contrast to arrest warrants issued by a judge based on finding of probable cause that a crime has been committed, administrative warrants are a product of the executive branch and not subject to judicial review.
Legal experts were aghast at the ICE memo and its implications.
“An ICE whistleblower just revealed a secret memo authorizing ICE officers to break into homes without a judicial warrant, which DHS’s own legal training materials say is unconstitutional!” Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, posted.
“I try to avoid hyperbole when it comes to Trump policies, but this is absolutely frickin’ insane—on about eleventy different levels,” Georgetown University law professor Steve Vladeck said. “Massive, systemic Fourth Amendment violations because … reasons.”
In a sign that ICE knew how controversial and potentially illegal the new guidance was, the memo was not widely distributed within ICE, according to Whistleblower Aid, the group representing the whistleblowers:
While addressed to “All ICE Personnel,” in practice the May 12 Memo has not been formally distributed to all personnel. Instead, the May 12 Memo has been provided to select DHS officials who are then directed to verbally brief the new policy for action. Those supervisors then show the Memo to some employees, like our clients, and direct them to read the Memo and return it to the supervisor.
Stanford University law professor Orin Kerr took an early and speculative stab at sussing out the underlying legal rationale the administration might be using for the memo.
The Latest From Minnesota …
In her deadly Jan. 7 encounter with an ICE agent, Renee Good sustained three gunshots wounds, the third of which was a fatal shot to the head, according to the findings of a private autopsy described but not released by her attorneys.
A 5 year old detained by federal agents was the fourth student in the same Minneapolis-area school district picked up by ICE in recent weeks, district leaders said. After the child and his father were detained Tuesday when they arrived home from preschool, the child was reportedly used as “bait,” the school district said, to knock on the door of his own home so agents could see if anyone was inside. ICE reportedly declined to leave the child with an adult present in the home, and the school district believes the father and child were transferred to a detention facility in Texas.
The 8th Circuit Court of Appeals, almost exclusively stacked with GOP appointees, issued an administrative stay of a lower court order that barred federal agents from arresting or tear-gassing peaceful protesters in Minneapolis.
Mass Deportation Watch
A medical examiner has officially deemed the death of 55-year-old Cuban Geraldo Lunas Campos at a detention camp in Texas a homicide.
Illinois officials have opened a investigation into claims that a notorious immigration raid last fall on a Chicago apartment building was prompted by a tip from building managers about Venezuelan immigrants not authorized live in the building in a potentially illegal attempt to force out Black and Hispanic tenants.
Greenland: Trump’s Damage Already Done
While there was a collective sigh of relief in Davos that President Trump seemed to temporarily back away from his most aggressive threats against Greenland, he has already unleashed a new world disorder that sets geopolitics on a dangerous new course. At the same time, there is no assurance that Trump — who doesn’t adhere to handshakes, contracts, treaties, or agreements — won’t re-up his threats against Greenland or other sovereign territories at his whim:
“While we may no longer be literally staring down the barrel of a gun on the trans-Atlantic relationship, we are still in a very rocky place,” Jacob Funk Kirkegaard, a senior fellow at Bruegel, a research institute in Brussels, told the NYT.
“The shift in the international order is not only seismic — but it is permanent,” Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, said in a speech.
“Our American Dream is dead,” an EU diplomat from a country that has been among the bloc’s transatlantic champions told Politico. “Donald Trump murdered it.”
Meanwhile, Greenland published a crisis preparedness brochure urging households to stock at least five days’ worth of supplies in case of a crisis.
Firing Lisa Cook Too Much Even for SCOTUS
Like Trump’s sorta, kinda, maybe step-down on Greenland, the Roberts Court’s hesitation to destroy the independence of the Federal Reserve leaves a weird feeling of not-quite relief, wariness about what comes next, irritation that it even got to this point, and frustration that the world is on bended knee hoping that malevolent actors will show a modicum of restraint.
It’s clear that whatever dispensation the Supreme Court gives to the Federal Reserve will be a special carveout, inapplicable to the entire apparatus of independent agencies constructed over the last 90 years, of which the central bank is only a part. The limits of the conservative justices’ ideological coherence has been reached, but it will not prompt a moment of reflection to rethink the entire enterprise — just a once-off exception to avoid any financial unpleasantness for the most prosperous Americans. The rest of us will benefit only incidentally.
Keep an Eye on This
The same federal magistrate judge who signed off on the search of the home, car, and person of WaPo reporter Hannah Natanson has now directed the Justice Department not to review the contents of her seized electronic devices, which her lawyers argue “contain essentially her entire professional universe.”
Magistrate William B. Porter of the Eastern District of Virginia issued the order after Natanson and the Washington Post company moved to intervene in the matter, which arises from an investigation into the allegedly improper handling of national defense information by a government contractor.
An interesting observation from Politico: “The newly released court records do not indicate whether Porter was informed that Natanson is a journalist or whether the judge determined that the 1980 law limiting searches of reporters, the Privacy Protection Act, did not apply in this instance.”
Trump Unleashes FCC on TV Talk Shows
The weaponized Federal Communications Commission is now targeting network talk shows, contending that they no longer enjoy a carveout for news programs and must provide equal airtime to political candidates.
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One of the more eerie aspects of the ICE "breaking-and-entering" memo is the furtive manner in which the contents and import are promulgated...supervisors and agents are given a quick peek at the memo, and then asked to promptly return it, as if to insulate the higher command from direct responsibility.
"No, that's not what we meant...", as agents use a battering ram to gain entrance to peoples' home, and snatch them away half-dressed.
These tactics, "authorized" by the much derided "administrative warrant", take us back to pre-Revolutionary America, where British soldiers could break down doors and raid private property at their discretion, actions that help fuel uprisings ultimately leading to war against the colonizers.
Well, it's time to go to war, in whatever guise, in order to preserve our liberties, guaranteed by the Bill of Rights, but now hanging by a thread.
And the courts? As pointed out by David, the trumpy 8th CA promptly issued a stay against District Court Judge Kate Menendez's TRO banning ICE/CBP use of pepper-spraying peaceful protestors, among other restraints imposed on agents, so it's back to business as usual, as we see in videos taken yesterday of protestors pinned to the ground, whilst getting blasted in the face point-blank with the noxious spray.
So, now what? Who's safeguarding 1st and 4th Amendment rights? Are these lost according to which judicial districts these unconstitutional crimes are taking place? What a shit-show!