WASHINGTON – Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem on Thursday brushed apart a query about ICE brokers probably, and routinely, violating the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution by approaching individuals on streets or going to their houses to demand proof of their U.S. citizenship.
During an trade with reporters on the White House, one reporter requested Noem if she is comfy with federal immigration brokers and officers “violating people’s Fourth Amendment rights by asking for papers without reasonable suspicion.”
“Every single action that our ICE officers take is according to the law and following protocols that we have used for years,” stated the DHS secretary. “They are doing everything correctly.”
The Fourth Amendment protects Americans from unreasonable searches and seizures by the federal authorities. It reads: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”
It has lengthy been understood to imply legislation enforcement can’t enter your own home with out a warrant signed by a choose, can’t power you to reply questions, and might’t goal you based mostly solely in your look or the language you converse.
Noem’s declare that Immigration and Customs Enforcement brokers are following normal protocols is a stark distinction to the video footage, pictures and eyewitness accounts of brokers’ violent conduct and haphazard focusing on of individuals in cities nationwide.
Nowhere has this been extra apparent than in Minneapolis, the place state officers are already suing the federal authorities for its ICE surge allegedly violating the First and Tenth Amendments of the Constitution.
A masked ICE officer right here final week fatally shot an American girl, Renee Good, as she was making an attempt to drive her automobile away. On Sunday, with out a choose’s authorization, brokers rammed down the door of a girl’s dwelling and pushed their manner inside. On Tuesday, extra masked ICE brokers had been captured on movie dragging a Minnesota girl from her automotive and hauling her away as she shouted that she was a disabled, autistic particular person making an attempt to get to a physician’s appointment.
Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) advised HuffPost on Tuesday that folks in her Minneapolis district live in “complete terror” as 1000’s of ICE brokers swarm the area and indiscriminately goal residents at fuel stations, supermarkets, on avenue corners and at their houses.
They are actually going “door-to-door” to query Latino and East African residents, stated Omar, regardless of having no authorized authority to take action.
“You’re supposed to find people who have removal orders. So why are you at every door?” requested the consultant. “They also have no authority to talk to you and I.”
But if ICE brokers are illegally focusing on and detaining individuals, who can cease them?
“No one,” stated Omar. “We are at a moment, I think, that nobody could ever think about, and like, there are no guardrails. There are no answers.”
During her comments Thursday about ICE agents’ violent behavior, Noem claimed “over and over again in litigation in the courts, we’ve proven that they’ve done the right thing.”
It’s not clear what litigation Noem is referring to, though. In November, a U.S. appeals court temporarily blocked a federal judge’s call to release hundreds of Chicago-area immigration detainees.
Separately, when the plaintiffs in a use-of-force case involving ICE agents this month sought to have the case dismissed, the judge brought up last week’s fatal shooting in Minneapolis and asked for more time to assess ICE agents’ use-of-force tactics against protesters in Chicago.
“It doesn’t give me much comfort in reading news reports that someone who — in some news reports, anyway — was described as a legal observer was shot yesterday in Minneapolis,” U.S. District Judge Sara Ellis said last week. “So that is my concern.”
The American Civil Liberties Union filed its own class-action lawsuit on Thursday against the Trump administration, and it alleges Fourth Amendment violations. It was filed on behalf of three Minnesotans challenging the administration’s policy of “racially profiling, unlawfully seizing, and unlawfully arresting people without a warrant and without probable cause.”
“The government can’t stop and arrest people based on the color of their skin, or arrest people with no probable cause,” Kate Huddleston, a senior staff attorney with the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, said in a statement. “These kinds of police-state tactics are contrary to the basic principles of liberty and equality that remain a bedrock of our legal system and our country.”
Despite ICE agents clearly stoking fear and violence in Minneapolis, President Donald Trump is signaling he has no interest in trying to ease tensions. To the contrary, he is now threatening to invoke the Insurrection Act to justify sending military troops into the region to quell the growing protests.
“No plans to pull out of Minnesota,” Noem confirmed Thursday.
Asked if she thinks there are any cases where ICE agents in the state have gone too far, the DHS secretary said federal immigration enforcement agents are “following the law and running their operations according to training.”
She ignored a question about whether she is now advising all Americans to carry proof of citizenship.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/kristi-noem-ice-agents-violate-4th-amendment_n_6967f34de4b0da4905d33f75