Immigration officials say they have broad power to enter homes without a judge

WASHINGTON (AP) — Federal immigration officials are exercising broad power to forcibly enter people’s homes without a warrant, according to an internal Immigration and Customs Enforcement memo obtained by The News, marking a dramatic shift in longstanding guidance aimed at respecting constitutional limits on government searches.

The memo authorizes ICE agents to use force to enter a residence based solely on a more limited administrative order to arrest someone with a final order of deportation, a move that advocates say runs afoul of Fourth Amendment protections and upends years of advice given to immigrant communities.

The change comes as the Trump administration dramatically expands immigrant arrests across the country, deploying thousands of officers under a massive deportation campaign that is already reshaping law enforcement tactics in cities like Minneapolis.

For years, immigrant advocates, legal aid groups and local governments have urged people not to open their doors to immigration agents unless they are shown an order signed by a judge. That guidance is based on Supreme Court rulings that generally prohibit law enforcement from entering a home without court approval. The ICE directive directly undermines that advice at a time when arrests are accelerating under the government’s immigration crackdown.

The memo itself has not been widely shared within the agency, according to a whistleblower complaint, but its contents have been used to train new ICE agents who are being deployed to cities and towns to implement the president’s immigration crackdown. New ICE employees and those still in training are told to follow the memo’s guidelines rather than written training materials that actually contradict the memo, according to the whistleblower’s disclosure.

It is unclear how widely the directive has been applied in immigration control operations. The News witnessed ICE agents burst through the front door of the home of a Liberian man, Garrison Gibson, with a 2023 deportation warrant in Minneapolis on Jan. 11, dressed in heavy tactical gear and with their rifles in hand.

Documents reviewed by AP revealed that the agents only had an administrative order, that is, there was no judge to authorize the search of private property.

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The change will almost certainly face legal challenges and harsh criticism from advocacy groups and pro-immigrant state and local governments that have spent years successfully urging people not to open their doors unless ICE shows them an order signed by a judge.

The News obtained the memo and whistleblower complaint from a congressional official, who shared them on condition of anonymity to discuss confidential documents. The AP verified the authenticity of the accounts in the complaint.

The memo, signed by Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons and dated May 12, 2025, reads: “Although the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has historically not relied solely on administrative orders to arrest aliens subject to final orders of removal at their place of residence, the DHS Office of General Counsel has recently determined that the U.S. Constitution, the Immigration and Nationality Act, and immigration regulations do not “prohibit reliance on administrative orders for this purpose.”

The memo does not detail how that determination was made or what its legal repercussions might be.

Homeland Security spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement emailed to the AP that everyone the department serves with an administrative order has already had “full due process and a final order of deportation.”

He said the officers who issued those warrants also found probable cause for the person’s arrest. He said the Supreme Court and Congress have “recognized the appropriateness of administrative orders in immigration enforcement cases,” without elaborating. McLaughlin did not respond to questions about whether ICE agents have entered a person’s home since the memo was issued based solely on an administrative order and, if so, how often.

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Recent arrests shed light on tactics

Whistleblower Aid, a nonprofit legal organization that helps workers expose wrongdoing, said in the complaint obtained by The News that it represents two unnamed U.S. government officials who “reveal a secret and apparently unconstitutional policy directive.”

A recent wave of high-profile arrests, many of them occurring at private homes and businesses and captured on video, has put a spotlight on immigration arrest tactics, including agents’ use of proper warrants.

Most immigration arrests are carried out under administrative orders, internal documents issued by immigration authorities that authorize the arrest of a specific individual but do not allow agents to forcibly enter private homes or other non-public spaces without consent. Only orders signed by judges have that authority.

All law enforcement operations, including those conducted by ICE and Customs and Border Protection, are governed by the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution, which protects all persons in the country from unreasonable searches and seizures.

People can legally deny federal immigration agents entry to private property if the agents only have an administrative order, with some limited exceptions.

Memo shown to ‘select’ officials

The memo says ICE agents can forcibly enter homes and arrest immigrants using only a signed administrative order known as an I-205 if they have a final order of deportation issued by an immigration judge, the Board of Immigration Appeals or a district judge or magistrate.

The memo says officers should first knock on the door and share who they are and why they are at the residence. They have a limited time to enter the house: after 6 am and before 10 pm. The people inside must have a “reasonable opportunity to act lawfully.” But if that doesn’t work, the memo says, they can use force to get in.

“If the alien refuses admission, ICE officers and agents must use only a necessary and reasonable amount of force to enter the alien’s residence, after proper notification of the authority and the officer or agent’s intent to enter,” the memo says.

The memo is addressed to all ICE personnel. But it has been shown only to “select DHS officials” who then shared it with some employees who were asked to read it and return it, Whistleblower Aid wrote in the disclosure.

One of the two complainants was allowed to see the note only in the presence of a supervisor and then had to return it. That person was not allowed to take notes. A whistleblower was able to access the document and legally release it to Congress, Whistleblower Aid said.

Although the memo was issued in May, David Kligerman, senior vice president and special counsel for Whistleblower Aid, said it took time for his clients to find a “safe and legal path to disclosing it to lawmakers and the American people.”

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Memo Says ICE Agents Are Told to Rely Only on Administrative Orders

ICE has been rapidly hiring thousands of new deportation officers to carry out the president’s mass deportation agenda. They are trained at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Brunswick, Georgia.

During a visit by The News in August, ICE officials repeatedly said that new agents were being trained to follow the Fourth Amendment.

But according to the whistleblowers’ account, newly hired ICE agents are told they can rely solely on administrative orders to enter homes and make arrests, even though that conflicts with Homeland Security’s written training materials.

Lindsay Nash, a law professor at Yeshiva University’s Cardozo School of Law in New York, said the memo “goes counter” to what the Fourth Amendment protects against and what ICE itself has historically said its authorities are.

He said there is “enormous potential for overreach and mistakes, and we have seen that that can happen with very, very serious consequences.”