‘Americans Should be Terrified’: Senate Dem Sounds the Alarm On ICE Breaking ‘Down Doors’ Without Warrants

Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) sounded the alarm during a CNN interview on Thursday about ICE entering the homes of Americans without warrants, following new reporting from the Associated Press on a leaked Homeland Security memo allowing them to do so.

Anchor Sara Sidner began the interview, asking, “And we just got this new information overnight. The Associated Press was the first to report that ICE is changing its policy. And it is now allowing its agents to forcibly enter homes without a warrant, and I just want to be clear, based solely on a more narrow administrative warrant to arrest someone on a final order of removal. Do you think this sharp turn from ICE’s policy and from normal policing tactics is a violation of the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment?”

“It is a blatant, craven violation of the Fourth Amendment, a bedrock protection for people in the privacy of their homes. Americans should be terrified that this secret ICE policy authorizes agents to break down doors and ransack through their homes, arresting or detaining people without a judicial warrant,” Blumenthal replied, adding:

There’s a critical difference between that administrative warrant, which is signed by an ICE officer or a deportation official, and a judicial warrant where a judge and a court have to find that there is cause—probable cause—to enter someone’s home. And this shocking policy is linked directly to top officials of ICE. In fact, the acting director of ICE authored this secret memo, and it is being circulated throughout ICE.

It is trained to new agents potentially on the job out there in Minnesota. It exemplifies what Americans are seeing in real time, and it’s part of a pattern that I documented in a report that I did interviewing dozens of American citizens illegally detained, held in deplorable conditions, and deprived of opportunities for medical treatment, for making phone calls. And that’s why the whistleblower came to us with this memorandum as part of our investigation on the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which is going to continue. We’re going to demand accountability for this lawless violation of the Fourth Amendment.

Immigration lawyer and activist Aaron Reichlin-Melnick highlighted the AP’s report on the memo on Wednesday night and noted, “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.”

Watch the clip above via CNN.

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