With an Immigration and Customs Enforcement memo that allows officers to enter homes without a judicial warrant, the Trump administration is seeking to usurp guardrails that are enshrined in the Fourth Amendment and have protected Americans’ civil liberties for centuries, experts in constitutional law and immigration policy told CNN.
Even in an administration that has always pushed an expansive vision of its law enforcement authority, the directive is notable for the way it tosses aside longstanding prohibitions against warrantless searches on private property — a legal concept that predates the creation of the United States and is among the country’s most foundational principles.
“The Bill of Rights, we thought, were the first 10 amendments,” said Mark Graber, a constitutional law scholar and University of Maryland professor.
With the newly discovered memo, he said: “I guess now we’re down to nine.”
Immigration officials had typically sought the arrests of undocumented people through two means: a judicial warrant, which is signed and authorized by a judge, or an administrative warrant, which is signed by people who work in the executive branch and fall under the purview of the president.
A critical difference between the two is that judicial warrants allow law enforcement to enter and search a person’s home or a non-public area of a business, while administrative warrants do not.
Most immigration arrests are carried out under administrative warrants because they require a lower bar to issue, and Trump administration officials have long harbored frustrations over limitations on officers pursuing targets on private property.
The internal memo, which was issued in May 2025 but revealed by a whistleblower complaint and first reported by the Associated Press on Wednesday, authorizes ICE officers to forcefully enter homes using only administrative warrants, essentially bypassing the neutral, third-party arbiters who would have reviewed evidence before signing a judicial warrant.
Administrative warrants are signed by ICE officers after an immigration judge orders the removal of an undocumented immigrant. But these immigration judges work for the Department of Justice at the pleasure of the attorney general, and the Trump administration refers to them as “deportation judges.”
“It would essentially be the same as if you were at the local police department, and the police officer that is both collecting the evidence and arresting you then goes and types up his own warrant to search your house because he thinks he has probable cause,” said Emmanuel Mauleón, an associate professor of law at the University of Minnesota.
“It’s deeply concerning, because there’s absolutely no safeguards and no accountability built into the system,” he said.
The history of the Fourth Amendment is rife with examples of local, state and federal law enforcement agencies seeking to challenge or whittle away its protections.
But this memo, Mauleón said, is “not the sort of incremental wearing down that we’ve seen over time.”
“It is what you might think of as crossing the Rubicon,” he said. “It is declaring that the fundamental protections that every court has recognized up to this point just don’t apply to DHS and to immigration stops.”
The Department of Homeland Security defended the directive in a statement in which spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said people who are served administrative warrants already had “full due process and a final order of removal.”
The administration’s own data shows hundreds of thousands of people last year were issued removal orders in absentia by immigration judges after they failed to show up to court.
The memo was not broadly distributed to ICE field offices in a departure from the way major policy changes have been typically announced internally.
Instead, in at least some cases, the guidance appeared to only be shared verbally, according to a source familiar. Some ICE officials learned about the guidance for the first time only after the Associated Press reported the change.
News of the memo prompted widespread alarm among civil liberties advocates and Democratic lawmakers. Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut called on Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and acting ICE Director Todd Lyons to testify before Congress about the memo. Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, whose state is experiencing the most intense surge of immigration enforcement in DHS’s history, said in a post on X “every American” should be “outraged by this assault on freedom and privacy.”
A Trump administration official told CNN the directive is “not a green light to randomly kick down doors.”
But it comes after months in which officers carrying out the president’s massive deportation mandate have used brutish tactics, largely unchecked, to detain immigrants and citizens alike.
“This administration’s general stance is that immigrants are ‘invaders’ and immigration officials should be allowed to expedite their arrest, detention and deportation,” said Kathleen Bush-Joseph, an attorney and analyst at the Migration Policy Institute. In doing so, she said, “they are pushing so many legal boundaries and doing things that have not been tried before in this way.”
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