The Constitution is not a bargaining chip for a budget negotiation
The Democrats demanded that Trump's immigration cops follow the law and the Constitution. The Republicans called those demands "nonstarters."
Funding for the Department of Homeland Security expired on Friday. That means the country’s third largest federal agency — and its most powerful domestic agency — is now in a partial shutdown. The point of contention is a list of 10 demands that Democrats have made to rein in Trump’s surge of deportation forces into U.S. cities.
The shutdown does not mean ICE and Border Patrol will cease operations. They’re amply funded through the so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill.” It does mean that the TSA, Coast Guard, and other DHS staff are now working with no pay.
On one hand, it’s encouraging to see the Democrats finally putting up a fight. Manipulating Congress’s complex budget rules to exercise the power of the purse is one of the few weapons they have right now. It’s not exactly a profile in courage — or even real leadership. Their actions come only after polls have shown overwhelming anger over Trump’s “reckoning and retribution” in Minneapolis and other cities. But it’s a start.
But we need to be clear about something. The Democrats’ demands aren’t “common sense reforms,” as Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer described them. All but a few are already the law — and most of the others are either longstanding norms in U.S. policing or the foundational principles of any free society. The “demands” are really just restatements of what most people already expect from law enforcement and democratic government: No secret police. Immigration officers shouldn’t be arresting and incarcerating U.S. citizens. Cops can’t threaten, beat, and arrest people who are for exercising their First Amendment rights. Cops can’t kill people with impunity.
This is basic stuff.
Nevertheless, I get why it’s probably good political strategy. Republican leaders have sunk so far into the MAGA abyss that they have declared these demands to be “nonstarters.” So because few Republicans have the spine to contradict the president, we now have video of GOP politicians defending the indefensible. Those will make for great campaign ads, and they’ll help make clear the existential stakes of the midterm elections.
The downside of the budget impasse is that it has made police state tactics a point of negotiation. In any other era, if a local police department were doing what ICE and Border Patrol have done in Chicago, Portland, and Minnesota, a state attorney general or federal government would have launched investigations, and the architects of the policy — Stephen Miller, Kristi Noem, Pam Bondi, Corey Lewandowski — would be sweating out questions at oversight hearings.
Instead, we’re talking about these abuses in the context of a budget fight. And that risks giving the impression that basic constitutional rights and restraints on police and executive power that date back to the Founding are, actually, negotiable. I guess we’ll see over the next couple weeks if the Democrats believe they really are. But before that happens, I think it’s worth looking at the demands themselves, why that they’d even need to be made only demonstrates the extent of our current crisis, and why the Republican opposition to them is dangerous and unprecedented.
1. Targeted Enforcement
DHS officers cannot enter private property without a judicial warrant. End indiscriminate arrests and improve warrant procedures and standards. Require verification that a person is not a US citizen before holding them in immigration detention.
The very first sentence of the first demand captures the urgency of this entire discussion. Fear of armed government agents raiding private homes gave us the Fourth Amendment. It’s the cornerstone of the Castle Doctrine, the centuries-old principle that the home should be a place of peace and sanctuary and, therefore, the government cannot forcibly enter without a warrant that has been independently reviewed and approved by a judge or magistrate. The warrant requirement even survived a full-frontal legal attack during the drug war. It emerged battered, but not yet fully beaten.
The Democrats included this demand as a condition for DHS funding because we recently learned that DHS has been operating on a secret memo from the Office of Legal Counsel claiming that immigration officers can enter private homes on nothing more than an “administrative warrant.”
An administrative warrant isn’t a warrant at all. It’s a piece of paper signed by a law enforcement officer (in the immigration context, it might also be signed by an immigration “judge,” though they aren’t really judges, and this administration has systematically destroyed whatever independence they may have once had.) The Fourth Amendment exists to prevent police from conducting invasive searches based merely on a hunch. An administrative warrant is just a way for a law enforcement officers to memorialize a hunch on paper. That’s why serious constitutional scholars have roundly condemned the DHS memo.
As I wrote a few weeks ago, the British crown’s broad authorization allowing soldiers to break into private homes to look for illegally imported goods is why we have a Fourth Amendment. It’s also one of the main reasons we have a country. If you can simply wish away the Fourth Amendment simply by calling armed intrusions into private homes “administrative,” the Fourth Amendment doesn’t really exist.
This is the Democrats’ first of ten demands and it is not only already the law, it’s literally one of the bedrock principles upon which the United States was founded. These rights — the Castle Doctrine, the Second Amendment — are rights that Republicans have traditionally championed, albeit inconsistently.
Yet incredibly, Republicans have singled out this demand as the biggest nonstarter of them all. Here’s Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson:
And here’s Oklahoma Senator Markwayne Mullin, falsely claiming that requiring a judicial warrant before a home invasion is like saying, “You have to have a judicial warrant to arrest someone for a DUI.”
Importantly — and predictably — these Republican objections to the warrant demand are absurdly dishonest. They’re claiming that Democrats are demanding that immigration officers obtain a judicial warrant before arresting anyone they believe is in the country illegally.
Frankly, I don’t think that’s a terrible idea, given the abuses we’ve seen. But it’s a mischaracterization of the actual demand. You can see the plain language in the excerpt above. This isn’t about arrests in public spaces. It’s about forcibly entering private homes and businesses.
The Republicans are hoping the public is too ignorant and bigoted to understand what their position would really mean. Bigoted in that they’re hoping most people don’t think immigrants are entitled to Fourth Amendment protections — that they haven’t earned the safety and comfort of knowing that heavily armed government officers can’t just barge into their homes for any reason. And ignorant in that they’re hoping the public is too stupid to understand that if you let federal cops raid homes without independent judicial oversight — if you let them storm private residences based on one Border Patrol agent’s hunch that an undocumented person may be inside — they will inevitably begin raiding the homes of U.S. citizens too. They’ll do this either by mistake, or they’ll quickly realize after enough unpunished “mistakes” that the memo provides a shortcut to raiding U.S. citizens for monitoring agents, protesting, or speaking out against these abuses.
This isn’t baseless speculation. It has already happened.
The potential for abuse here is amplified by the fact that Trump, Miller, JD Vance, and others in this administration have explicitly told immigration officers that they are absolutely immune from criminal or civil liability. Given the widely reported DHS quotas and this country’s high rate of gun ownership, giving agents carte blanche to barge into private homes is a recipe for violent, potentially lethal confrontations between homeowners — citizen and noncitizen — and immigration agents.
The next part of the first demand is to “end indiscriminate arrests and improve warrant procedures and standards.” This first part, again, is already the law. You cannot arrest people indiscriminately. To arrest someone for an immigration violation, an officer must “have sufficient facts that would lead a reasonable person to believe, based on the circumstances, that the alien has violated federal immigration laws and is likely to escape before an ICE warrant can be obtained.”
The second clause — “improve warrant procedures and standards” — is vague, and some of have suggested that the Democrats intentionally made the language vague to put up barriers to arrests of undocumented people even in public spaces. But there have been countless incidents over the past year in which ICE and Border Patrol have been shown to have obtained warrants on false pretenses, lied on warrants, police reports, and in court documents, made illegal arrests, and illegally incarcerated arrestees. Putting an end to these abuses should not be controversial.
The last sentence of the first demand is so obvious and self-evidence that it’s obscene that it would be at all controversial: “Require verification that a person is not a US citizen before holding them in immigration detention.”
This, too, is unambiguously already the law. If we give government agents the power to jail someone for immigration violations without first requiring them to establish that said person isn’t here illegally — or isn’t a U.S. citizen — we give them the power to jail anyone at any time for any reason. In a free society, the burden cannot be on us to prove our legal status on demand. Otherwise, we’d be a country where everyone — citizens and non-citizens alike — must be prepared at all times to prove their legal right to be here. We’d be a cliched “papers, please” dystopia — the very sort of society we’ve used as shorthand for totalitarianism.
And yet Attorney General Pam Bondi — the chief law enforcement officer in the country — has declared that if you’re stopped by immigration officers, you’d better be ready to show your papers. As has Greg Bovino.
2. No Masks
Prohibit ICE and immigration enforcement agents from wearing masks and other face coverings.
I wrote at length on this in The New Republic last month, so I’ll just quote from that.
“When law enforcement officers of any kind wear masks and withhold their identity, it smacks of tactics that are consistent with an authoritarian government,” said [Chris] Magnus, the ex-police chief and former head of Border Patrol [under Biden].
“We’ve had police here for two centuries,” said George Pappas, an immigration judge whom Trump’s Justice Department fired in July. “They didn’t need masks. You use masks when you’re looking to carry out an illegal, extrajudicial operation. This is straight from the fascist playbook.”
The images and videos of masked agents have provoked alarm in law enforcement and legal communities. They’ve been criticized by groups ranging from the New York City Bar Association to the International Association of Chiefs of Police. Even the FBI has asked DHS to remove the masks, pointing out that criminals have committed robberies and sexual assaults while impersonating immigration officers.
But more to the point, masked secret police jumping out of vans to snatch people up and whisk them away isn’t supposed to happen in a free society. It’s the sort of thing we’ve cited to distinguish ourselves from military juntas or, more recently, from countries like Brazil or the Philippines, where masked officers have carried out horrific extrajudicial killings by the thousands. Or from Russia, where the spectacle of masked police carrying out illegal and undemocratic orders is common enough to have birthed the term “mask show.” . . .
Republicans have defended the masking by citing wildly exaggerated, context-free statistics about alleged increases in assaults on immigration officers.
DHS officials have dismissed such comparisons as hysterical and hyperbolic. They say masking is necessary to prevent activists from “doxing” immigration officers and claim there has been an alarming surge in assaults on those officers. In June, they put the increase in assaults at 413 percent; by July, it was over 700 percent; and by October, it was over 1,000 percent.
Last I saw, it was up to 1,300 percent. More ridiculous still, DHS has also claimed that “threats” against ICE officers have increased . . . by 8,000 percent.
These numbers are bullshit.
The 2024 baseline figure against which the administration is making these calculations is 10, according to Fox News. That is, there were 10 alleged assaults on ICE officers between January and June 2024. There were 79 in 2025. Meanwhile, over the same period, the number of federal agents participating in deportations and removals has swelled from 6,000 to over 30,000. That puts the assault rate on federal immigration officials (0.23 per 100) exponentially lower than the assault rate on police officers more generally (13.5).
Given the ramped-up immigration enforcement and the exceptionally violent and aggressive tactics, we’d expect to see an increase in assaults on agents. More interactions, and more violent interactions, mean more opportunities for those interactions to escalate. We also know from surveillance and cell phone videos that agents have arrested and charged people with assault either on little evidence or for defending themselves when assaulted by police.
Since I wrote that piece, the Cato Institute released data about deaths among ICE officers. As it turns out, 2025 was the second safest year in the history of the agency.
The chance of an ICE or Border Patrol agent being murdered in the line of duty is about one in 94,549 per year, about 5.5 times less likely than a civilian being murdered. We should be much less concerned about their safety. Less than 10 percent of all Border Patrol agents and ICE officers who died in the line of duty were murdered.
Given the dramatic increase in ICE operations, and the move toward more confrontational and violent tactics, these numbers are pretty remarkable.
The journalist Garrett Graff provides even more context.
Being an elementary school student in the United States is more deadly than being an ICE officer.
The leading cause of “on-duty death” of ICE officers? Covid.
As Aaron Reichlin-Melnick says, “The last time there was even a non-COVID death on duty was 2016, when an officer had a heart attack during a foot pursuit. Before that, a training accident in 2003, then a fall down an elevator shaft at a jail in 1975.” In other words, as I’ve written before, the landscapers and groundskeepers being targeted by ICE are far far far more likely to face injury and death on the job than the ICE officers wrestling them to the ground.
And yet in city after city, day after day, ICE officers and CBP agents charge into American cities dressed as if they’re assaulting Fallujah or elite special forces charging into a Taliban stronghold.
In fact, given that retail workers across America faced 94 workplace homicides in 2023, it stands more to reason that the clerks at Home Depot should be wearing tactical gear as opposed to the swarms of CBP agents and ICE officers storming their parking lots to roust day-laborers.
The truly miraculous thing about the last year is just how consistently peaceful and nonviolent the resistance to federal immigration forces has been. In the face of daily physical abuse, threats, intimidation, and routine constitutional violations, nearly all of the resistance has been peaceful. It’s been chaotic, disruptive, fierce, and persistent. But it’s been overwhelmingly peaceful.
And so despite the best efforts of this administration to cast protesters and watchers as “domestic terrorists,” “assassins,” and insurrectionists, nearly every photo coming out of occupied cities looks like this one, taken last week in St. Paul — masked, tac-ed out, heavily armed federal cops hulking over citizens wearing parkas, bathrobes and sweatpants, armed only with whistles and cell phones. (The woman in her robe, who has become something of an icon, is journalist Sam Stroozas. She works for Minneapolis Public Radio.)
There are two reasons why this administration allows and encourages masking for immigration officers:
They want to terrorize immigrants and the people who defend them.
They want to make it impossible to hold abusive immigration officers accountable — either criminally, civilly, or through shaming and social reprobation.
3. Require ID
Require DHS officers conducting immigration enforcement to display their agency, unique ID number and last name. Require them to verbalize their ID number and last name if asked.
You can’t hold abusive cops accountable if you can’t identify them. Without a name or badge number, you can’t file a complaint. Prosecutors can’t charge them if they commit a crime. And you can’t sue them.
If you’re opposed to this demand, you’re advocating for secret police. There’s really no other explanation.
The shooting of Marimar Martinez illustrates just how far this administration has pushed us into the upside-down. If you’ll recall, federal agents in Chicago boxed Martinez in with their cars, confronted her, shot her, and nearly killed her. Border Patrol agent Charles Exum shot Martinez five times, then boasted in a text to his pals that his five bullets managed to tear seven holes in her body. Fellow agents responded by calling Exum a “legend.” Some offered to buy him beers. Greg Bovino emailed Exum to praise him, and reporteldy to relay praise from Kristi Noem and Donald Trump himself. The agents arrested Martinez and charged her with assaulting a federal officer. They claimed she intentionally rammed their vehicle, then pulled a gun and tried to kill them. DHS called her a “domestic terrorist.”
They were lying about all of it. As with Renee Good and Alex Pretti, Trump’s thugs shot an innocent person, then slandered the victim while celebrating their violence. The charges against Martinez were eventually dropped with prejudice. When Martinez’s lawyers asked a federal court to release Exum’s texts, emails, and body camera footage, the DOJ argued — after telling the world that Martinez had tried to murder federal law enforcement — that releasing that information would “sully” Exum’s reputation.
The judge refused, and ordered the footage released. It showed that Exum rammed into Martinez, not the other way around. It showed that the agents then immediately drew their weapons, with one imploring, “It’s time to get aggressive.” They shot Martinez within seconds. Her gun, which she owned and carried legally, never left her purse.
This administration believes that immigration officers entrusted with the power to detain, arrest, and kill should have complete anonymity, even as they demand that private citizens carry identification and proof of citizenship with them at all times. They maliciously slander protesters, ICE watchers, and the people they’ve gunned down as “domestic terrorists,” then argue that even the most abusive officers be protected from having their reputations sullied. They refuse to discipline agents who threaten, beat, and arrest people exercising their constitutional right to record and monitor them, but then use facial recognition technology to monitor protesters, using that information to threaten and intimidate them, and even harass them at their homes.
This administration is arguing that not only do armed agents of the state have a more compelling right to privacy and anonymity while on the job than private citizens and residents, those agents are also free to target anyone who threatens their “privacy.” I can’t think of a clearer description of authoritarianism.
And here too, Republicans are attacking a ridiculous caricature of the Democrats’ demand. When asked about the requirement to wear name tags or a badge number, for example, House Speaker Mike Johnson retorted that federal immigration officers should not have to put their home addresses on their uniforms.
That’s great, Mike. Absolutely no one suggested that.
4. Protect Sensitive Locations
Prohibit funds from being used to conduct enforcement near sensitive locations, including medical facilities, schools, childcare facilities, churches, polling places, courts, etc.
This, too, has long been the policy of the federal government. Except during Trump’s first term, of course. It’s grounded not just in basic decency, but in sound public policy. If you want immigrants to show up for their hearings, you don’t make courthouses a place they fear. You don’t want to make immigrants afraid to seek medical care, for themselves or their children. You’d think Republicans wouldn’t want to make them afraid of going to church. Or school.
But this is not a decent or humane administration. So they’ve abandoned these norms. The result: Fewer immigrants show up for court — not just for immigration hearings, but as witnesses in criminal cases. Fewer immigrants are reporting domestic violence or cooperating with domestic violence investigations. Immigrants are foregoing medical appointments, and medical care, and they’re afraid to take even desperately sick children to the hospital. And they’re keeping kids home from school. And because this administration isn’t just targeting immigrants, but anyone who “looks” like an immigrant, these fears aren’t limited to immigrants.
Immigrants are also no longer attending religious services. The arrest of Don Lemon, Georgia Fort, and two other journalists also lays bare this administration’s disingenuous horseshit about “religious freedom.” The DOJ claims that the journalists conspired to violate the rights of worshippers at a Christian nationalist church whose pastor is also an ICE officer. But immigration forces have been harassing churches in immigrant neighborhoods for months. They’ve shot clergy in the face with less lethal weapons.
After Lemon’s arrest, JD Vance accused him and the protesters he was covering of “scaring little kids.” The church demonstration may not have been the smartest tactic but the protesters weren’t armed. They weren’t violent. By contrast, I’d imagine five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos was pretty scared when armed ICE officers took him and used him as bait to arrest his parents. I’d imagine that the kids who need chaperones to walk them home from school so they aren’t grabbed by masked immigration agents are pretty scared too.
And if we’re going to talk about terrified children, we should probably talk about the thousands of kids who have been put in overcrowded, decrepit detention facilities — many of whom are legally seeking asylum with their parents. There are multiple credible reports of worm-infested food, denial of medication and medical care, cells so crowded you can’t see the floor, and unsafe drinking water. Children in these places are harming themselves, starving themselves, getting sick under horrific, inhumane conditions, and writing desperate pleas for help.
But hey, JD is mad that some white, Christian kids were briefly made uncomfortable by protesters.
5. Stop Racial Profiling
Prohibit DHS officers from conducting stops, questioning and searches based on an individual’s presence at certain locations, their job, their spoken language and accent, or their race or ethnicity.
Again, this is already the law. Or at least it was. A majority of the Supreme Court seems to believe that immigration officers can now stop and question people based on a combination of the factors above, even though none of those factors is a crime.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who gave us “Kavanaugh Stops,” has since clarified that, while you can profile based on race and some combination of those other factors, it is still illegal to profile immigrants based on race alone.
But it is still rampant. People are stopped and questioned solely because of how they look. Residents of Minneapolis and other cities say federal agents have demanded to know specifically where their “Hmong,” Somali, and “Asian” neighbors live.
6. Uphold Use-of-Force Standards
Place into law a reasonable use-of-force policy, expand training and require certification of officers. In the case of an incident, the officer must be removed from the field until an investigation is concluded.
It is already the law that any police use of force must be reasonable.
As for training and certification, the extent to which either is a matter of law or policy depends on the jurisdiction. This demand is vague enough to be useless. And yet it still gets at some really alarming practices from this administration.
In the years I’ve been covering policing, I’ve written at length about the exonerative language police agencies use in public communications, the inherit bias and unfairness of internal investigations, and how the system is generally awful at holding bad cops accountable. But most agencies do at least pretend that they’re interested in justice, because they understand that they still need the support and buy-in of the community.
This administration doesn’t even pay lip service to the idea of proper training or unbiased investigations of misconduct. When the president explicitly says he’s sending federal forces into a city to exact “reckoning and retribution,” when the people they’re targeting are said to “poison the blood of the country,” when protesters and monitors are smeared as domestic terrorists paid to assault officers with their cars, and when new recruits are summoned with explicitly white nationalist ads, the message is not that “we’re protecting and serving,” it’s “we’re targeting and terrorizing.”
After the killing of Alex Pretti, Greg Bovino quickly announced the officers who killed him were back in the field. (The administration has since walked this back.) In fact, after nearly every allegation of excessive force, the White House, DOJ, and DHS immediately vindicated their agents in statements that celebrated their violence and denigrated the people who were abused or killed.
Within hours of Renee Good’s killing, one anonymous DHS official told NBC News that the officers who rushed her car and shot her violated agency protocols — as they very clearly did. Yet within a couple hours of that statement, the administration insisted that the officers had done everything right, that there would be no investigation at all, and that Good was a domestic terrorist who had been trained to use her vehicle as a weapon.
Proper training, restraint in the use of force, and proper certification all conflict with Trump’s stated goals of “unleashing” or “taking the handcuffs off” of immigration officers to wreak havoc and terrorize. This is an administration that sees deescalation tactics as woke. (Unless we’re talking about the shooting of Ashli Babbit, which is apparently the single most horrific incident of police brutality this country has ever seen.)
Moreover, if you have proper policies, training, and accountability measures in place, that means you have to punish officers when they violate their training and agency policy. And Trump has made clear that he has no intention of punishing federal law enforcement officers for much of anything — save for failing to remove their shoes before entering his home.
7. Ensure state and local coordination and oversight
Preserve the ability of state and local jurisdictions to investigate and prosecute potential crimes and use-of-excessive-force incidents. Require that evidence is preserved and shared with jurisdictions. Require the consent of states and localities to conduct large-scale operations outside of targeted immigration enforcement.
This may be the only demand that isn’t already either law, custom, or policy. But it’s intuitive, smart policy, and entirely justified in light of current events.
There have always been rifts when it comes to how state law applies to federal law enforcement. For example, federal police have refused to wear body cameras when working in states that require all cops to wear them. The DOJ has even argued that local police working on federal task forces shouldn’t have to wear them. There have been disputes over whether local police working with federal task forces can ignore state restrictions on civil asset forfeiture. And, in some cases, state officials have tried to prosecute federal law enforcement for criminal offenses over the objections of the federal government, with mixed results.
But here too, what’s happening now is different. Trump is openly, defiantly refusing to distribute federal funding to states that didn’t vote for him. He has made clear that part of his motivation for surging federal forces into these cities is retributive and political. The DOJ isn’t cooperating with local police and investigators in the Good and Pretti shootings because they don’t believe the people of Minneapolis have any right to hold accountable the agents who murdered two of their neighbors.
We can say this confidently: After Good was killed, the acting U.S. attorney for the city — a career prosecutor, not a political one — vowed to cooperate with local officials. So did the FBI field director. They were both overruled when Trump-appointed U.S. attorney Daniel Rosen — who has no prosecutorial experience — returned from a trip, heard about said cooperation, and intervened to stop it.
At least 14 of Rosen’s staff have since resigned, including those working on the Good shooting, and those asked to sign of off on the arrests of Lemon and other journalists. One of those who resigned was the prosecutor in charge of the fraud investigation that Trump cited as his reason for occupying Minneapolis in the first place.
8. Build safeguards into the system
Make clear that all buildings where people are detained must abide by the same basic detention standards that require immediate access to a person’s attorney to prevent citizen arrests or detention. Allow states to sue the DHS for violations of all requirements. Prohibit limitations on member visits to ICE facilities regardless of how those facilities are funded.
Some of this, too, is covered by existing law. Incarceration facilities are required by law to be humane and hygienic, at least in theory. DHS has gotten around these requirements in a couple ways. First, immigration facilities are only supposed to house people for hours at a time. So they aren’t subject to the same requirements about conditions that jails or prisons are. But DHS is holding people at these facilities for days, weeks, and sometimes months. We now have a growing pile of reports from attorneys, journalists, human rights groups, judges, and others about shocking, inhumane conditions at facilities around the country.
Second, the Trump administration has gutted the internal offices at DHS that are supposed to maintain standards and investigate complaints. These facilities have long had poor conditions, and oversight offices have long been under-funded and under-staffed. But as one former high-ranking DHS official who worked in one of those offices told me last fall, since Trump took office again, “There’s no oversight. There’s no reporting. There’s no access. Until this administration, if a lawyer or an NGO complained about inhumane conditions, that was something we took very seriously. Now they just don’t care. It’s fully part of the plan. They’re open about it. You put people in detention, deny them access to a lawyer, and just continue to squeeze them until they’re so miserable that they give up their rights.”
DHS has also straight-up denied members of Congress access to detention facilities, a clear violation of federal law. They’ve continued to do so even after ordered by federal courts to let them in.
9. Body cameras for accountability, not tracking
Require use of body-worn cameras when interacting with the public and mandate requirements for the storage and access of footage. Prohibit tracking, creating or maintaining databases of individuals participating in first amendment activities.
Outfitting all immigration officers with body cameras has emerged as one of the few areas of bipartisan agreement. If you’re surprised to hear that Republicans support body cameras, the second part of this demand offers a clue. ICE has widely been reported to be using facial recognition tech to build a database of immigration protesters and ICE watchers and match them to images scraped form the internet. Body cameras may help populate that database with a lot of faces. (ICE acting director Todd Lyons has denied the existence of any such database, but I’m going to trust the reporting far more than anything this administration says.)
All else being equal, body cameras are good idea. But they’re only as effective as the policies used to implement them. If a police agency can release exculpatory footage while withholding incriminating footage, that’s the opposite of transparency. It’s worse than not having body cameras at all.
Body cameras also aren’t of much use if officers aren’t punished for failing to turn them on, or if the footage can be selectively edited. This, after all, is an administration that’s already been caught distributing AI-generated content designed to deceive.
Groups like the ACLU have suggested that body camera footage should be available but isn’t, judges should instruct juries to presume that the footage would have been incriminating for the officers involved. That’s a smart idea at the state level. But it won’t do much good at the federal level, because most of these incidents will never see the inside of a courtroom — this administration isn’t going to charge these officers criminally, and there’s no real way for victims to sue them civilly.
9. No paramilitary police
Regulate and standardize the type of uniforms and equipment DHS officers employ during enforcement operations to bring them in line with civil enforcement.
This one hits home. It’s what I’ve been harping on for a couple decades now.
The problem is that I’m not sure what it means to bring uniforms “in line with civil enforcement.” Police uniforms and gear have grown increasingly militaristic at all levels of law enforcement for a long time now. Moreover, what we’re seeing with ICE, Border Patrol, Homeland Security Investigations, and Trump’s motley crew of deportation cops isn’t really militarization so much as de-professionalization. Yes, some these officers are needlessly dressing in full commando garb. Others are dressing like some tinpot dictator’s assassination squad. Some dress like mafia goons. Some just wear street clothes.
Some sort of standardization would certainly help. Federal officers should have easily identifiable uniforms with names and badge numbers. They should not be masked. They should be dressed so that they’re easily distinguishable from, say, the guy who abducted Savannah Guthrie’s mother. If you see them approaching you, it should be reasonably clear whether you’re about to be arrested or about to be mugged.
But this, too, merely restates existing DHS policy. Current federal policy requires an agent “identify himself or herself as an immigration officer who is authorized to execute an arrest” at the time of the arrest “as soon as it is practical and safe to do so.”
The Trump administration has simply chosen to ignore that policy.
That brings me to the underlying problem with this list: Trump’s immigration forces are already violating the policies, norms, laws, and the Constitution. They’re doing it every day. They’re ignoring court orders. They’re racially profiling. They’re denying detainees access to their attorneys, and shuffling them around the country to prevent them from challenging their detention. They’re surveilling, threatening, beating, and arresting people for recording them, protesting them, and other First Amendment-protected activity. They’re beating, arresting, and detaining people who are merely going about their daily business, like trying to take their kid to the hospital. They appear to be erasing or “losing” surveillance video when they’re compelled by a court to produce it. And when officers do clearly commit crimes — beatings, illegal arrests, lying on police reports — the administration has made no effort to hold them accountable.
I’m not sure what good it will do to issue a new set of laws, policies, and regulations, when most of them are merely restating laws, policies, and regulations that the administration is already ignoring. Even if Republicans were to concede all ten of these demands, then what? We get a restoration of DHS funding, they go right back to ignoring the demands they just conceded, and the Republican-led Congress does nothing to hold them accountable for it.
Under the leadership of Congressional Budget Office head Russell Vought, this administration has made clear that it intends to ignore Congressional appropriations and move money around at will — for example, by taking money earmarked for emergency food and medical care for impoverished children overseas and using to provide personal security for Russell Vought.
Again, there is some political value in the Democrats making these demands. Public support for Trump’s immigration policy has dropped through the floor. The vast majority of the public hates what we’re seeing in Minneapolis. Getting Republicans on record defending reckless, lawless police tactics makes sense.
But we need to be clear that these are not reforms. And they certainly aren’t the “dramatic changes,” that the Democrats and media outlets have characterized them to be. All but a couple are nothing more than insisting that the Trump administration stop violating existing law. That isn’t something we should have to demand of the government at all. And it sure as hell should not be the opening bid in a negotiation.
Trump, Miller, and Bondi currently believe that the law is whatever they says it is. And because the Supreme Court has immunized this lawless president from any criminal accountability, because this president can then pardon any of his subordinates from Miller down to the least experienced Border Patrol officers before leaving office, and because it is all but impossible to sue any of these people civilly, they may be right: In practical terms, the law may well be whatever Donald Trump says it is.
To stop this assault on the rule of law and our fellow citizens and neighbors, we’ll need to stop playing defense. We need to make clear to the new immigration hires all the way up that there will be consequences for lawlessness. Then we can move on to actual reforms.
I’ll have some suggestions on how we do that in a forthcoming post.
The rule of law is a Non Starter! WTAF?
The level of confidence among Republicans as they reject constitutional norms and precedent along with the letter of the law is staggering. So is the level of hesitancy among Democrats as they belatedly, and surprisingly timidly, push back against the Republican project.
Democrats may not win, but they have to act as though they will, or at least as though they know that in a just society they damn well would.
Above all they have to conduct themselves like patriotic men and women who know that standing up for the constitution and the rule of law is not a matter of partisan "branding" or a campaign ploy in advance of the 2026 mid-terms, but the one and only right thing to do.