Warrant?
What is this "warrant" of which you speak?
I put this out as a note on Wednesday, intending to follow up by posting it for my few followers - but of course I didn’t because different outrages kept arising. But believing it’s still relevant if a couple of days ago, here it is.
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AP is reporting that an internal ICE memo being used to train new ICE thugs declares that they can smash their way into private homes without the need for a judicial warrant required by the 4th Amendment.
All they need, according to the DHS Office of the General Counsel (in other words, DHS’s own lawyer) is an agency-issued administrative arrest warrant for someone with a final order of removal and the Constitution is totally cool with it.
What could go wrong? Oh, wait....
This news comes in the immediate wake of the case of American citizen ChongLy “Scott” Thao, the man who was dragged out of his home in St. Paul in his underwear in freezing temperatures after ICE secret police thugs smashed their way in without a warrant, screaming and pointing guns at his family.
The Tonton Macoute1 wannabes were supposedly after “two convicted sex offenders.” In other words, it went just like the memo described and “we don’t need no stinking (actual proper) warrant.” (PS: The people the secret police were looking for weren’t there and contrary to officious claims, Thao did not “share his home” with them.
Sadly, the AP meekly described the internal memo as “a sharp reversal of longstanding guidance meant to respect constitutional limits on government searches.” “Meekly” because this is no “reversal of guidance” as if it’s a matter of opinion or worse, convenience, it’s a (literal) assault on rights because the agency is not to “respect” such limits, it is to obey them.
What this is, in fact, is an immoral, illegal, improper, infuriating rejection of a base Constitutional principle on the sanctity of the home that dates back in English law to at least the early 1600s and can even be found to date from ancient Rome.
Our 4th Amendment protections have already been undermined and restricted (for example to the point that your car is often referred to as a “4th Amendment-free zone”) but what’s been crossed here is not just a bright red line, it’s a line of flashing beacons and blaring klaxons.
In an earlier version of the story, one that got updated while I was writing this, the AP reported that ICE agents sometimes wait hours for a targeted person to leave a house. Apparently we are now to accept that the US Constitution must yield because the cops’ constitutions cannot bear such a burden.
I keep telling you to look it up!