What legal rights do you have in encounters with ICE?
Videos of confrontations between Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and Minneapolis residents have flooded social media, showing some of the 3,000 officers who are deployed in the city stopping, questioning and detaining residents.
In one case, immigration agents escorted a U.S. citizen who is a grandfather of Hmong ancestry out of his house in his underwear in freezing weather. In another case, a father of a 5-year-old girl was briefly detained and zip-tied after he said a federal agent falsely accused him of not being a U.S. citizen because of his accent. The agency is also under scrutiny for reportedly dispatching a 5-year-old boy to knock on the front door of his home to lure relatives outside before agents then took the child into custody.
The events have sparked protests and prompted confusion over what ICE is legally allowed to do in public and private locations. Are there limits on when and how ICE can approach or detain you? Does the law differentiate between encounters in public versus a private space, such as a home? And is the Supreme Court becoming more tolerant of aggressive ICE actions?
What rights do people have when approached by ICE?
Federal law gives immigration agents the authority to arrest and detain people believed to have violated immigration law. But everyone — including immigrants suspected of being in the U.S. illegally — is protected against unreasonable searches and seizures under the Constitution's Fourth Amendment.
"All law enforcement officers, including ICE, are bound by the Constitution," said Alexandra Lopez, managing partner of a Chicago-based law firm specializing in immigration cases.
The Fourth Amendment doesn’t stop ICE from trying to deport people who have broken immigration law, but it has traditionally constrained the agency. The more extensive an enforcement action is, the higher the bar for immigration officers to justify their actions.
For example, officers can question someone in a public place, but more extensive interactions — such as a brief detention that’s not a formal arrest — require a "reasonable suspicion" that someone has committed a crime or is in the U.S. illegally, the Supreme Court has ruled.
Reasonable suspicion "has to be more than a guess or a presumption," said Michele Goodwin, a Georgetown University law professor. To meet this standard, a reasonable person would need to suspect that a crime was being committed, had been committed or would be committed.
Agents must meet an even higher bar to arrest someone. They need "probable cause," which generally requires enough evidence or information to suggest a person has committed a crime.