Ice not just breaking the law; it's trying to rewrite it
By Noah Feldman / Bloomberg Opinion
In an outrageous expansion of its authority, Immigration and Customs Enforcement is now authorizing its agents to arrest anyone they suspect of being undocumented, even if the officers don’t have a warrant and the person isn’t a flight risk.
The directive, contained in a memo obtained by The New York Times, reverses long-standing ICE policy and effectively renders the warrant requirement itself empty. Coming on the heels of another legally indefensible memo, which purported to allow ICE agents to enter the homes of suspected undocumented people without a judicial warrant, the new policy shows that ICE isn’t just exploiting legal loopholes to create massive sweeps. Instead, it reveals an agency actively attempting to change the legal landscape to turn itself into an all-powerful police force.
Federal law permits ICE to make warrantless arrests under only two circumstances. The first is when an agent sees someone actively crossing the border illegally. That scenario isn’t relevant to the current ICE sweeps, which take place in cities far from the border.
The second situation in which the law allows a warrantless arrest, the one addressed by the new memo, is if an ICE officer “has reason to believe” that someone is in the U.S. without legal authority and “is likely to escape before a warrant can be obtained for his arrest.”
https://www.heraldnet.com/opinion/coment-ice-not-just-breaking-the-law-its-trying-to-rewrite-it/
