The Intercept: Confidential ICE Handbook Lays Out Paths for Investigators to Avoid Constitutional Challenges

The Intercept: Confidential ICE Handbook Lays Out Paths for Investigators to Avoid Constitutional Challenges by Eoin Higgins:

When U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents go after suspected violators of immigration and customs law, they do whatever they can to get consent from their targets. The idea is simple: By getting their targets’ consent, ICE agents can avoid the complications that arise from the Fourth Amendment’s protections against unreasonable searches and seizures.

Internal policies, laid out in documents reviewed by The Intercept, show how the agency’s investigative wing, Homeland Security Investigations, uses a complex web of civil and criminal warrants, statutory regulations, and legal tactics to effectively operate with as few restrictions as possible across the country.
Protecting agents’ work from constitutional challenges is one of the focuses of the “HSI Search and Seizure Handbook.” The techniques laid out focus heavily on obtaining consent from investigative targets for searches. One method available to agents is to issue “ICE warrants,” which do not carry the power of judicial warrants, but which immigration lawyers warn can be used to mislead or intimidate targets into granting consent for search and seizure.

. . .

Although the document is out of date, it provides a window into how ICE’s investigative wing uses its power to execute warrants for violations of the law ranging from undocumented immigration to money laundering.