Five Ways ICE Violates the Constitution (and How Congress Lets It Happen)
ICE is breaking the Constitution, and Congress isn’t stopping it. They’re defending it. These five examples show how constitutional decay starts with justification, not denial.
A few days ago, Speaker Mike Johnson said that ICE is “doing what the American people demand.” He framed it as a defense of democracy. It was anything but.
The Constitution doesn’t answer to public demand. It exists to restrain it. The people can elect whomever they want, but no election authorizes a government to violate rights. The problem isn’t only that ICE acts outside the law. The problem is that elected officials are now justifying it. That’s how you take an oath to protect the Constitution, then slowly talk yourself out of meaning it.
Every federal agency lives inside boundaries set by Congress and the Constitution. Once an agency crosses those lines, it is no longer enforcing law but rewriting it.
As I prove in the book I’m writing, The End of the Experiment, democracy doesn’t collapse when governments shred the Constitution. It erodes when they convince us that specific exceptions are not only harmless, but necessary. ICE is allowed to practice those exceptions, and the results should terrify anyone who believes rights aren’t negotiable.
Here are five ways ICE is violating the Constitution right now.
1. Home Raids Without Judicial Warrants (Fourth Amendment)
ICE agents routinely show up before sunrise pretending to be local police. They flash administrative papers and hope the homeowner doesn’t realize that only a judge can authorize entry. The Supreme Court made that clear in Payton v. New York.
An “ICE warrant” is an administrative warrant, not a judicial warrant. It is a piece of paper signed by the same agency carrying out the raid. When agents cross the threshold without judicial approval, it is not immigration enforcement. It is trespassing backed by federal authority.
No American would tolerate that from their local police department. We shouldn’t tolerate it from ICE either.
2. Detaining People Who Already Won Their Cases (Fifth Amendment)
Imagine winning your case in court and being told you cannot be deported because doing so would put your life at risk. Now imagine sitting in a detention cell for months afterward.
In one case, the court said that three men could not be deported for fear that they would be subject to torture in their own country. ICE, however, continued to detain them for at least three months after their legal victory. That was not a clerical error. It was a deliberate disregard for both the court’s authority and ICE’s own policies, which require prompt release in such situations.
Holding people who have already won in court isn’t immigration enforcement. It is arbitrary detention, and it violates the Fifth Amendment’s promise that no person shall be deprived of liberty without due process of law.
3. Blocking Access to Lawyers (Fifth and Sixth Amendments)
The right to an attorney only matters if the government lets you find one. There are documented cases of attorneys searching for their clients for weeks, only to discover that ICE had moved them to undisclosed facilities. In many cases, the government refused to confirm where detainees were being held.
At the Alligator Alcatraz detention center in Florida, more than 1,200 names have disappeared from official records (read more here). Lawyers representing those individuals say their clients simply vanished from the system. No transfer notice. No case updates. Nothing.
This is not an administrative error. It is state-sanctioned invisibility. When people disappear into custody without access to counsel, it is not law enforcement. It is the erosion of the very principle that keeps power accountable to law.
4. Courthouse Arrests (Separation of Powers)
A courthouse is supposed to symbolize justice, not fear. Yet ICE has conducted arrests in courthouses across the country, sometimes during hearings. Judges, prosecutors, and state officials have condemned the practice for scaring off witnesses and victims.
When a federal agency turns state courts into ambush sites, it undermines the very institution that keeps prosecution and judgment separate. If people stop coming to court because they fear being arrested, justice stops being public. It becomes selective.
Courthouse arrests don’t make America safer. They make the law weaker.
5. Arresting U.S. Citizens (The Ultimate Violation)
Since Trump returned to office in 2025, ICE has arrested 170 U.S. citizens. Not undocumented immigrants. Not visa overstays. American citizens.
Some were born here. Others were naturalized decades ago. All were detained until someone at ICE finally realized the mistake. The agency calls them “database errors,” as if jailing an American were a clerical slip. But it’s not a typo when the handcuffs click.
This isn’t just unconstitutional. It’s un-American. When a government can jail its own citizens and shrug it off, the Constitution isn’t being enforced. It’s being ignored. And that’s how a democracy begins to forget what makes it one.
Johnson’s Justification Problem
Johnson doesn’t deny that these violations happen. He rationalizes them. By claiming that ICE is “doing what the American people demand,” he accepts the abuses and calls them democracy in action.
That’s worse than denial. It tells every federal officer watching that breaking the Constitution is fine as long as the crowd cheers.
The Real Threat
The real threat isn’t only ICE. It’s the willingness of the system to excuse it. Every time we treat a constitutional violation as necessary, we redraw the boundaries of freedom until they disappear.
The Constitution isn’t an obstacle. It’s the agreement that keeps power from consuming the people who gave it. The moment we start believing that exceptions are acceptable, we begin to live under something other than law.
That’s not the America anyone demanded.
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I look forward to reading your upcoming book.