Vance Endorsed Slashing Civil Liberties Protections During Minneapolis Visit

If you read mainstream coverage of Vice President JD Vance’s trip to Minneapolis this week, you’d be forgiven for thinking that he went there as an eyelinered MAGA Mahatma Gandhi, asking the city a simple question: How about we just give peace a chance?

CBS News, a network whose bosses have made elaborate contortions to please the president, portrayed Vance as calling on local officials to “lower the temperature.” ABC, NBC, and PBS all had similar headlines.

But how did the temperature get so high? Per lawsuits, affidavits, and reporting from the scene, it’s mostly responsive to heavy-handed tactics from DHS officers in the city. Their number, around 3,000, far exceeds the normal civilian law enforcement force there to maintain order in normal times. The flood resulted in the killing of Renee Good earlier this month; a lawsuit from the ACLU accused DHS of detaining people without warning or cause en masse, solely on the basis of their race.

But Vance made another remark while in Minneapolis that has largely escaped attention.

He threw his support behind the idea that the executive branch can enter private homes as part of immigration enforcement without a warrant. It’s an argument that would transform the Fourth Amendment, which mandates that independent judges can issue warrants on the request of law enforcement.

Vance’s remarks came in response to a question about a whistleblower disclosure to the Senate, first reported by the AP. Per the disclosure, ICE issued a memo in May arguing that immigration authorities could enter private residences absent a judicial warrant if they believe that someone with a final deportation order is inside.

It’s a dramatic expansion of how immigration enforcement specifically and law enforcement generally has been expected to operate. ICE, as well as other law enforcement bodies, can only enter a private residence with a judicial warrant: immigration authorities can issue administrative warrants, but those have never been the basis for entry absent the consent of a resident. The ICE memo purports to change that.

What makes Vance’s remarks in Minneapolis somewhat confusing is that he appeared to state things in a way that misdescribed the law, let alone ICE’s attempt to reinterpret it.

Vance tried to dismiss the issue by saying that “nobody is talking about doing immigration enforcement without a warrant. We’re talking about different types of warrants that exist in our system.”

“Typically, in the immigration system, those are handled by administrative law judges. So we’re talking about getting warrants from those administrative law judges,” he said. “And then, of course, with other cases you get judges – or you get warrants from a judge. That’s very consistent with the practice of American law.”

That appears to be a misstatement of the law: Administrative law judges do not issue immigration warrants. Immigration judges, employees of the Justice Department, adjudicate immigration cases, but also do not issue administrative warrants. Those are issued directly by executive branch employees — immigration officers.

“Our understanding is that you can enforce the immigration laws of the country under an administrative order if you have an administrative warrant,” Vance added. “That’s our best faith attempt to understand the law.”

Even with the errors in his description of how these things work, Vance is endorsing a huge intrusion on the protection against unreasonable search and seizure. In both the world of the ICE memo and the world Vance described, search or arrest warrants sought by the executive branch would be issued by the executive branch. As Vance described it, they would be issued by administrative law judges, whose independence has been curtailed under recent Supreme Court precedent. As the memo described it, immigration officers would issue warrants. In either case, the executive branch would be seizing power from the judicial branch, infringing on what have long been understood to be fundamental constitutional protections.

Cesar Cuahetemoc Hernandez, a law professor at Ohio State, argued to TPM that the interpretation would grant ICE officers more powers than those available to any other law enforcement official in the U.S.

“What this memo ostensibly does is it permits them to march into people’s homes under the flimsiest of evidentiary standards,” he said. “And that’s why we have the Fourth Amendment, because we want to make sure that there is some independent third party who is reviewing the evidence.”