Immigration officers claim sweeping authority to enter homes without a warrant, the memo says

WASHINGTON (AP) — Federal immigration officers are asserting sweeping authority to forcibly enter people’s homes without a warrant, according to an internal Immigration and Customs Enforcement memo obtained by The Associated Press, marking a sharp reversal of long-standing guidance aimed at respecting constitutional limits on government inspections.

The memo allows ICE officers to use force to enter a residence based only on a narrower administrative order to arrest someone with a final order of removal, a move advocates say flies in the face of Fourth Amendment protections and upends years of advice given to immigrant communities.

Read more: US citizen says Immigration and Customs Enforcement forced open the door of his Minnesota home and took him out in his underwear after a warrantless search.

The shift comes as the Trump administration dramatically expands immigration detention across the country, deploying thousands of officers as part of a mass deportation campaign that is already reshaping 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 a warrant signed by a judge. This directive has its roots in Supreme Court rulings that generally prohibit law enforcement from entering a home without judicial approval. ICE’s guidance directly undermines that advice at a time when arrests are accelerating under the administration’s anti-immigration crackdown.

The memo itself was not widely shared within the agency, according to the whistleblower complaint, but its contents were used to train new ICE officers deployed to cities and towns to carry out the president’s anti-immigration crackdown. New ICE employees and those still in training are required to follow the memo’s guidelines rather than written training materials that actually contradict the memo, the whistleblower revealed.

Read more: Court lifts restrictions on immigration officers’ tactics in Minnesota

It is unclear how widely the Directive applies to immigration enforcement operations. The Associated Press witnessed Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers storming the front door of the home of a Liberian man, Garrison Gibson, carrying a deportation order starting in 2023 in Minneapolis on Jan. 11, wearing heavy tactical gear and with their rifles drawn.

Documents reviewed by the AP revealed that the agents only had an administrative warrant, meaning there was no judge who authorized the raid on private property.

The change would almost certainly face legal challenges and intense criticism from advocacy groups and immigrant-friendly state and local governments that have spent years successfully urging people not to open unless ICE shows them a warrant signed by a judge.

The Associated Press obtained the memo and whistleblower complaint from a congressional official, who shared it on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive documents. The AP verified the accuracy of the accounts in the complaint.

“Although the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has not historically relied on administrative warrants alone to detain aliens subject to final orders of removal at their place of residence, the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of the General Counsel recently determined that the U.S. Constitution, the Immigration and Nationality Act, and immigration regulations do not prohibit reliance on administrative warrants,” says the memo, signed by Acting Director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement Todd Lyons, dated May 12, 2025. Orders for this purpose.”

The memorandum did not explain in detail how this decision was made nor what its legal ramifications were.

DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin said in an email statement to the AP that each person served by the department under an administrative warrant has already been subject to “full due process and a final order of removal.”

She said the officers who issued those warrants also found probable cause to arrest the person. She said the Supreme Court and Congress “have recognized the validity of administrative orders in immigration enforcement cases,” without elaborating. McLaughlin did not respond to questions about whether ICE officers have entered a person’s home since the warrant was issued, relying only on an administrative order, and if so, how many times.

Recent arrests highlight tactics

Whistleblower Aid, a nonprofit legal organization that helps workers expose wrongdoing, said in a whistleblower complaint obtained by The Associated Press that it represents two anonymous U.S. government officials who “reveal secret — and apparently unconstitutional — policy directives.”

A recent spate of high-profile arrests, many of which took place in private homes and businesses and were captured on video, has highlighted immigrant detention methods, including officers’ use of proper search warrants.

Most immigration arrests are made under administrative orders, which are internal documents issued by immigration authorities that authorize the arrest of a specific individual but do not allow officers to forcibly enter private homes or other non-public places without their consent. Only orders signed by judges carry this authority.

All law enforcement operations—including those conducted by Immigration, Customs, and Border Protection—are governed by the Fourth Amendment, 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 have an administrative warrant only, with some limited exceptions.

Memorandum on display for “selected” officials.

The memo says ICE officers can forcefully enter homes and arrest immigrants using a signed administrative warrant known as an I-205 if they have a final order of removal issued by an immigration judge, Board of Immigration Appeals, district judge or justice of the peace.

The memo says officers should knock on the door first and share their identity and why they are at the residence. They are limited in the hours they can enter the house – after 6 a.m. and before 10 p.m. Those inside must be given a “reasonable opportunity to act lawfully.” But if that doesn’t work, the memo says, they can use force to get in.

“If an alien is denied entry, ICE officials and agents must use only the amount of force necessary and reasonable to enter the alien’s residence, after appropriate notification of the officer or agent’s authority and intent to enter,” the memo said.

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

One of the whistleblowers was only allowed to see the memo in the presence of the supervisor and then had to return it. This person was not allowed to take notes. Whistleblower Aid said a whistleblower gained access to the document and legally disclosed it to Congress.

Although the memo was issued in May, David Kligerman, senior vice president and special counsel at Whistleblower Aid, said it took its agents some time to find a “safe and legal path to disclosure to lawmakers and the American people.”

ICE officers are required to rely only on administrative orders, the memo says

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) quickly hired thousands of new deportation officers to implement the president’s mass deportation agenda. They were trained at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Brunswick, Georgia.

During an Associated Press visit there in August, ICE officials repeatedly said new officers are being trained to follow the Fourth Amendment.

But according to the whistleblower’s account, newly hired ICE officers were told they could rely only on administrative warrants to enter homes to make arrests, even though that conflicted with the Department of Homeland Security’s written training materials.

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

She said there was “a huge potential for abuse and mistakes, and we have seen that this can happen with very serious consequences.”