Three Reasons ICE Isn't Being Checked

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00:00When people find out that I'm a constitutional law professor, the question they ask me most

00:04often is, why isn't anyone doing anything about ICE?

00:08ICE has been trampling on Americans' rights extensively in recent months.

00:14It's not just that they're grabbing up people on the basis of their looking Latino and speaking

00:19Spanish or working in jobs that they associate with potentially undocumented people, which

00:24is bad enough.

00:25It's that ICE agents wear masks, don't show identification, stop people on the street,

00:31grab them up and put them into SUVs.

00:33According to a report in Wired magazine, it's gotten so bad that the FBI itself issued an

00:39internal memo warning criminals impersonating ICE agents or abducting women on the streets.

00:46Now, to be clear, lawyers are trying to fight back against ICE, but they've run into three

00:53kinds of serious obstacles.

00:54The first problem is the Supreme Court.

00:57In a decision in September, the court outrageously said that ICE agents can detain someone, quote

01:04unquote, briefly.

01:05It's not actually briefly, to find out if they're citizens, if a set of circumstances exist to

01:11give them, quote, reasonable suspicion that the person might not be documented.

01:15And that might not sound that bad on the surface, but it's actually extremely bad because the

01:19court then went on to say, in a short opinion by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, that if a person

01:25is speaking Spanish and looks like they're Latino, that might be enough as part of the totality

01:33of the circumstances to detain them.

01:35Now, that's a total violation of our basic equal protection principles.

01:38There's no way you could arrest somebody on the basis of their racial or ethnic profile.

01:43And yet the Supreme Court has said that that's permitted to ICE agents.

01:47Then there are the loopholes that the Trump administration is exploiting to enable ICE

01:52to do what it's doing.

01:53For example, ICE agents are supposed to have a warrant when they grab people up.

01:56But there's a provision of the law that says if they have reason to believe that you might

02:00flee and not be able to be captured by them, then they can grab you up without a warrant.

02:05There's also no law that explicitly says the ICE agents have to identify themselves.

02:09There's no law that says they can't wear masks.

02:12And so the Trump administration is taking advantage of these loopholes to perpetuate policies that

02:17nobody ever imagined would be in place previously in the United States of America.

02:22Finally, there's Congress.

02:23Congress could simply pass a law prohibiting ICE from doing the things that it's doing.

02:27They could say that they can't stop people on the basis of racial or ethnic profiling.

02:31They could say that ICE agents have to identify themselves.

02:34They could specify that ICE agents always have to use a warrant.

02:36And they have done exactly none of those things.

02:39So what can we actually do about ICE?

02:43We have to make ICE's conduct into a major issue in the 2026 and 2028 elections

02:48and pressure our elected officials and in particular Congress

02:51to make this a priority and change ICE's practices.

02:55If we don't do that, nothing is going to change.

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