Vance Endorsed Slashing Civil Liberties Protections During Minneapolis Visit
If you read the mainstream reporting on Vice President JD Vance’s trip to Minneapolis this week, you’d be forgiven for thinking he went there as MAGA Mahatma Gandhi, asking the city a simple question: What if we just gave peace a chance?
CBS News, a network whose bosses have made elaborate contortions to please the president, presented Vance as calling on local officials to “lower the temperature.” ABC, NBC and PBS all had similar titles.
But how did the temperature get so high? According to lawsuits, affidavits and news reports from the scene, this was primarily in response to heavy-handed tactics by the city’s DHS agents. Their number, approximately 3,000, far exceeds the normal number of civilian law enforcement agencies responsible for maintaining order in normal times. The flooding led to the death of Renee Good earlier this month; a lawsuit filed by the ACLU accused DHS of mass detaining people without warning or reason, solely on the basis of their race.
But Vance made another remark in Minneapolis that has largely escaped attention.
He supported the idea that the executive branch can enter private homes without a warrant as part of immigration controls. It’s an argument that would transform the Fourth Amendment, which requires that independent judges be able to issue arrest warrants at the request of law enforcement.
Vance’s remarks came in response to a question about a whistleblowing disclosure in the Senate, first reported by the AP. According to that disclosure, ICE issued a memo in May saying immigration authorities could enter private residences without a court warrant if they believed a person with a final deportation order was inside.
This is a dramatic expansion of how immigration enforcement, in particular, and law enforcement in general, should operate. ICE, as well as other law enforcement agencies, can only enter a private residence with a judicial warrant: Immigration authorities can issue administrative warrants, but these have never been used as the basis for entry without a resident’s consent. The ICE memo purports to change that.
What makes Vance’s remarks in Minneapolis somewhat confusing is that he seemed to phrase things in a way that mischaracterized the law, not to mention ICE’s attempt to reinterpret it.
Vance tried to brush off the issue by saying that “nobody talks about enforcing immigration law without a warrant. We talk about different types of warrants that exist in our system.”
“Typically in the immigration system, these cases are handled by administrative judges. So we’re talking about getting warrants from those administrative judges,” he said. “And then, of course, in other cases you get judges – or you get warrants from a judge. That’s entirely consistent with the practice of American law.”
This appears to be an error in the law: administrative judges do not issue immigration warrants. Immigration judges, employees of the Department of Justice, try immigration cases, but also do not issue administrative warrants. These are issued directly by employees of the executive branch – immigration officers.
“Our understanding is that you can enforce the country’s immigration laws under an administrative order if you have an administrative warrant,” Vance added. “This is our best attempt to understand the law.”
Even with the errors in his description of how these things work, Vance endorses a huge intrusion into protection against unreasonable searches and seizures. In the world of the ICE memo and in the world described by Vance, search or arrest warrants requested by the executive branch would be issued by the executive branch. As Vance described it, they would be issued by administrative law judges, whose independence has been curtailed by recent Supreme Court precedent. As the memo describes, immigration officials would issue warrants. In either case, the executive branch would seize power from the judiciary, thereby undermining what have long been considered fundamental constitutional protections.
Cesar Cuahetemoc Hernandez, a law professor at Ohio State, argued to TPM that the interpretation would give ICE agents more powers than any other law enforcement official in the United States has.
“What this memo apparently does is it allows them to break into people’s homes to the flimsiest of standards of evidence,” he said. “And that’s why we have the Fourth Amendment, because we want to make sure there’s an independent third party looking at the evidence.”
