‘We want you arrested because we said so’ – how ICE’s policy on raiding whatever homes it wants violates a basic constitutional right, according to a former federal judge

Teyana Gibson Brown, wife of Liberian immigrant Garrison Gibson, reacts after a federal immigration officer arrested her husband in a warrantless raid in Minneapolis, Jan. 11, 2026, in what a judge later ruled was a violation of Gibson's Fourth Amendment rights. AP Photo/John Locher

As Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, agents continued to use aggressive and sometimes violent methods to make arrests in its mass deportation campaign, including breaking down doors in Minneapolis homes, a bombshell report from the Associated Press on Jan. 21, 2026, said that an internal ICE memo – acquired via a whistleblower – asserted that immigration officers could enter a home without a judge’s warrant. That policy, the report said, constituted “a sharp reversal of longstanding guidance meant to respect constitutional limits on government searches.”

Those limits have long been found in the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Politics editor Naomi Schalit interviewed Dickinson College President John E. Jones III, a former federal judge appointed by President George W. Bush and confirmed unanimously by the U.S. Senate in 2002, for a primer on the Fourth Amendment, and what the changes in the ICE memo mean.