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ICE is hell-bent on erasing all evidence of its lawless actions [1]
['Daily Kos Staff']
Date: 2025-09-09
According to the Department of Homeland Security, simply videotaping raids conducted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents is violence, and it’s doxing, and prosecutable. Also according to the DHS, ICE agents don’t need to fill out any paperwork about who they are targeting.
Additionally, according to DHS, elected officials need to provide prior notice to be allowed into ICE facilities to perform their congressionally mandated oversight duties, despite a law saying they need to do no such thing.
U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem
Taken together, it’s clear that DHS wants no record of ICE’s actions. And hey, redefining “violence” to include “recording ICE agents” helps Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem throw around comically large numbers. She’s now insisting that “our brave ICE law enforcement are now facing a 1000% increase in assaults against them as they risk their lives to arrest the worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens.”
Examples of those terrifying assaults? According to a DHS spokesperson, someone dumped trash on an ICE agent’s lawn, and someone made a sign with a profanity directed at a specific ICE agent by name. The horror.
Somehow, those brave ICE agents are getting past the terror of mean signs, still managing to band together in roving patrols to do masked jumpouts at Home Depots and car washes based on nothing but race, just to hit deportation numbers. They’re not arresting the worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens.
Unlike a lot of the administration’s actions, no Supreme Court case says that videotaping law enforcement officers is protected by the First Amendment. That’s not because the Supreme Court has ruled otherwise, but because they’ve never addressed it at all. However, there are numerous state court cases and statutes protecting the right to record law enforcement. Back in 2020, the ACLU secured a huge settlement in a lawsuit against DHS over the right to photograph and record vehicles idling at the southern border.
The settlement prohibits U.S. government officials from interfering with people’s efforts to record at any “publicly accessible area at any land port of entry in the United States.” It also prohibits the government from requiring people to obtain any sort of prior authorization to record law enforcement at the border. Though the lawsuit was brought in California, the settlement covers all land ports of entry into the United States. So, the DHS knows full well that the right to record law enforcement agents, at least at the border, is protected by law. They just don’t care.
ICE agents have also been freed from the tyranny of filling out paperwork about the immigrants they are targeting for arrest. ICE agents used to be required to identify the specific person they wanted to arrest, provide detailed information such as known addresses, employment, and criminal history, and get a supervisor’s approval.
No more, says DHS, which was probably necessary given that ICE arrests are now mostly of the “jump out and surround a random someone and drag them to the ground” variety instead. Or, as a former ICE official put it, “It’s hard to fill out a worksheet that just says, ‘Meet in the Home Depot parking lot.’”
White House border czar Tom Homan
Paperwork is also difficult to fill out in advance when DHS policy, according to “border czar” Tom Homan, says that it is perfectly fine for ICE agents to stop whoever they’d like, based on nothing but their physical appearance. Homan says federal agents don’t need any probable cause to detain whoever they’d like, no pesky advance paperwork or approval required.
And let’s not forget that DHS is also blocking members of Congress from accessing ICE facilities to perform their oversight duties. Now, elected officials must get prior approval despite a law that literally says they do not need prior approval to access ICE detention facilities.
Unsurprisingly, complaining about this will do no good. The DHS shut down its oversight office, freezing the processing of over 500 civil rights complaints in the process. So, good luck getting anyone to pay attention to any claims that ICE agents are violating the civil rights of immigrants.
No recordings, no paperwork, no oversight. DHS is systematically eliminating every way we have to keep tabs on law enforcement to ensure that Trump’s immigration crackdown, no matter how illegal or violent, can’t be stopped.
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