Aaron Reichlin-Melnick Profile picture
Senior Fellow @immcouncil. Tweeting on immigration policy and data. Formerly immigration lawyer with @IJCorps. Views my own, retweets =/= endorsements.

Jan 21, 9 tweets

🚨HOLY CRAP. 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!

ICE then hid the memo from the public, passing it along by word of mouth.

ICE secretly told its officers that any time someone has been ordered removed, ICE can break down their door.

It has been accepted for generations that the only thing which can authorize agents to break into your home is a warrant signed by a judge. No wonder ICE hid this memo!

Chillingly, the whistleblower says that ICE trainers were directed (no paper trail?) to train all of ICE's new recruits that these administrative warrants authorize breaking into peoples' homes, even though DHS's own training materials still make clear that's illegal!

The memo cites no legal authority, only a further secret DHS General Counsel (replaced early on by a Trump loyalist) opinion saying administrative warrants filled out by an ICE officer authorize breaking into homes of people ordered removed. Here's what such a warrant looks like.

This is the Trump administration trashing the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution in pursuit of its mass deportation agenda.

Worse, a footnote to this memo suggest they won't even rule out authorizing home invasions with no judicial warrant for people not even ordered removed!

In short, this secret memo explains SO MUCH of what we've been seeing over the last months, including this raid of a home in Minneapolis where ICE officers presented no judicial warrant before breaking in the door.

Turns out they were secretly told they don't need one!

In a sign of how explosive ICE knew this secret memo would be, one whistleblower says he was only allowed to read the memo and was barred from taking note, and warned that employees had been punished for disagreeing.

At least one ICE instructor resigned rather than teach it!

At a time of unprecedented daily scandals, this this whistleblower complaint, and the memo it reveals for the first time, breaks through for me as beyond the pale.

It's the federal government conspiring in secret to subvert the Fourth Amendment.

Read: s3.documentcloud.org/documents/2649…

Looks like Senator Blumenthal's office worked with the whistleblowers, and has already put out a letter to the Trump admin demanding answers.

Congress MUST act. This is a five alarm fire for our basic rights under the law.

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