Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal on Wednesday called for Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and ICE chief Todd Lyons to testify before Congress about an internal memo authorizing ICE officers to enter people’s homes without a judge’s warrant.
Blumenthal sent a letter to the chairs of the Senate Homeland Security Committee and the Judiciary Committee asking them to “immediately” call for the testimony following “a shocking anonymous whistleblower disclosure … detailing ICE’s new secret policy to ignore the Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution and enter private homes without a judicial warrant.”
The memo, which Blumenthal said was sent to his office in a whistleblower complaint, authorizes ICE officers to use force to enter a residence based solely on a more narrow administrative warrant to arrest someone with a final order of removal. It breaks with longstanding guidance meant to respect limits on government searches.
The Connecticut senator also sent a letter Wednesday to Noem and Lyons, the acting director of ICE, writing, “The Fourth Amendment is a bedrock principle of our Constitution and an integral privacy protection against unreasonable searches and seizures, especially in the most intimate of settings, the home.”
Blumenthal said in the letter to Noem and Lyons that the memo, asserting that immigration officers have these sweeping powers, should “appall every American.”
“Every American should be terrified by this secret ICE policy authorizing its agents to kick down your door and storm into your home. It is a legally and morally abhorrent policy that exemplifies the kinds of dangerous, disgraceful abuses America is seeing in real time,” Blumenthal said in a news release.
The Associated Press first reported on the internal memo.
