DOJ Deportation Memo Pretends The Fourth Amendment Doesn’t Exist
from the land-of-the-free,-my-ass dept
USA Today has secured the DOJ’s official rules of engagement for mass deportations under the Alien Enemies Act. (Better yet, it has shared it with everyone, rather than keep it to itself!)
Trump’s resurrection of a law no one thought the Land of the Free would ever use again is disturbing enough. What’s in the memo [PDF], dated March 14, 2025, is just as concerning. This memo was the instigator of long series of horrific events, as Nick Penzenstadler and Will Carless note in their report for USA Today.
The directive, issued by Attorney General Pam Bondi March 14, provides the first public view of the specific implementation of the 1798 Alien Enemies Act invoked to deport migrants accused of being members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua.
A day after that announcement, March 15, immigration officials apprehended and flew more than 200 Venezuelans to El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT, which has been criticized for its harsh and dangerous conditions.
All the plans were already in place. All the Trump Administration was waiting for was the starting gun: Bondi’s memo. Since then, hundreds of people have been stripped of their rights and sent straight to a maximum security prison that’s not only in a country they’re not citizens of (the memo targets alleged Venezuelan gang members but sends them to El Salvador), but leverages a law last used to incarcerate thousands of migrants during World War II to free the US government from having to deal with minor irritations like due process.
The memo orders immigration officers (and the hundreds of law enforcement officers, federal and local, that have been deputized or agreed to help the government carry out these heinous deportations) to utilize an extremely questionable checklist to determine who is or isn’t a Tren de Aragua gang member. Chances are, everyone picked up by government agents will somehow manage to rack up enough gang points to justify their extrajudicial rendition. This checklist isn’t here to prevent accidental deportations. It’s there to be pencil-whipped by willing participants in the administration’s racial cleansing program.
But there’s plenty more in this memo that shows the administration cares nothing for the law or the restrictions placed on it by constitutional rights that — whether Trump et al like it or not — are guaranteed to even undocumented immigrants.
First, there’s the DOJ’s explicit blessing of using the ends to justify the means. Agents and assisting law enforcement officers are told they’re more than welcome to arrest first and file the proper paperwork later.
To be clear, as outlined below in the section titled, “Apprehension and Removal Procedures in Reactive Matters,” it is not necessary to complete Forms AEA-21A and AEA-21B prior to apprehending an Alien Enemy, where an officer has a reasonable belief that all four requirements to be validated as an Alien Enemy are met. In such circumstances, officers are authorized to apprehend the Alien Enemy and thereafter complete Forms AEA-21A and AEA-21B.
Form AEA-21A is the “Enemy Validation” form — the bullshit “this is gang member” checklist that pretends pretty much any tattoo is a reference to gang affiliation and that any communication, relationship, or relative proximity to anyone else the government unilaterally declares to be a TdA member is evidence of gang membership.
AEA-21B is the more relevant piece of paper: Notice and Warrant of Apprehension and Removal. In other words, the government can apprehend and move towards removal prior to serving the warrant. Also, this isn’t a real warrant. This is an administrative warrant that is issued by the arresting agent/agency and is completely free of any judicial oversight, even when written up after the fact.
Then there’s this: the Fourth Amendment apparently ceases to exist, according to the DOJ, at least when it comes to arresting people (with or without administrative warrants) under the Alien Enemies Act executive order. (h/t Steve Vladeck on Bluesky)
Given the dynamic nature of enforcement operations, officers in the field are authorized to apprehend aliens upon a reasonable belief that the alien meets all four requirements to be validated as an Alien Enemy. This authority includes entering an Alien Enemy’s residence to make an AEA apprehension where circumstances render it impracticable to first obtain a signed Notice and Warrant of Apprehension and Removal (Form AEA-21B).
That’s absolutely not how the law works. While the Alien Enemies Act pretty much renders due process nonexistent, it does not grant the government the power to enter private residences without a judicial warrant. An administrative warrant (that being one crafted and signed by only the agency performing the arrest) does not grant the authority to enter private areas. The DOJ certainly knows this, and yet AG Bondi seems to think using the phrase “dynamic nature” means every potential arrest now falls under the “exigent circumstances” warrant exception.
The memo claims part of the “dynamic nature” is the possibility that some deportation targets may already have arrest warrants active for other criminal acts. Whether or not this is true, officers still need judicial search warrants to enter people’s homes, even for the purposes of effecting an arrest. There’s simply no exclusion in the Alien Enemies Act that justifies warrantless searches.
Of course, the DOJ knows it should be able to get away with this, at least for the short term. Once due process is stripped, it’s impossible to challenge the lack of a valid search warrant, just as it’s impossible to challenge the arrest itself. Invoking rights does no good when the government is determined to ignore them. Yet again, the Trump Administration is demonstrating it cares more about aiding and abetting bigotry than respecting the rule of law.
Filed Under: 4th amendment, cecot, dhs, doj, donald trump, due process, immigration, kristi noem, mass deportations, tda
Comments on “DOJ Deportation Memo Pretends The Fourth Amendment Doesn’t Exist”
So Ice can come into your house, claim you are an illegal alien, send you to a detention center a 1000 miles away while your plane to a concentration camp in a foreign nation is prepared.
No 4th amendment.
No due process.
forced extradition to a concentration camp.
How are people still arguing that we aren’t in a constitutional crisis?
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How are people still arguing that we aren’t in a constitutional crisis?
Denial or complicity, they either refuse to accept that reality is real, or they’re all in favor of what’s happening.
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Because kory is the dumbest motherfucker you will ever have the displeasure of interacting with.
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It is about as nonsensical to talk about a “constitutional crisis” with regard to the current administration as it is to talk about a “marriage crisis” between “spouses” that are married for solely clerical reasons.
The Trump administration does not share bed or table with the Constitution, most particularly not with the Bill of Rights. It cannot change its administrational components, at least not on a dime, but it can and does pervert it to better suit its own ends.
With regard to the Republic, they are more or less “Friends, Americans, Countrymen! I’ve come to bury the Constitution, not to praise it.” And as opposed to Marc Anthony, they mean it.
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The United States has existed in a constitutional crisis for over 90 years, we’ve just gotten used to it.
It started when we decided that it was Ok for the President (FDR) to bully Congress and the Supreme Court and control the country’s industries like a Soviet Commissariat because, ‘iT NeeDs tO bE Done!’ (Great Depression/WWII)
Then Congress ceded their authority to declare war, allowing the President to legally blow up the planet for 90 days. (Because Communism! Red Menace!!!)
The last nail in the Constitutional coffin was 9/11: USA PATRIOT, secret memos and executive orders, Guantanamo, murder by drone. Due process? Buried under the reflecting pools.
The only difference now and then is that Trump doesn’t dress up his attitude of Constitution-as-a-suggestion as well as his predecessors.
so where are the tariff monies really going?
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They are a tax on consumers. They don’t really change the prices of superyachts that rely more on labor than raw components.
So the end game is distribution of wealth in the form of buying power from the poor to the rich.
Only the rich are able to play the kind of shell games that avoid tariffs and income taxes and other taxation by purportedly offshoring assets and company figments.
Of all the times not to be lazy...
Given how openly contemptuous the regime has been towards the law and constitutional rights I’m surprised they didn’t just replace all of that with a single line: ‘The law is for the little people, go nuts’.
So we officially moved to arresting first and then writing down why after.
No republican can talk any shit about law and order.
None of them [Amendments] do,anymore.
Trump said two things pre-election that stuck in my mind.
1) I wanna be a dictator.
2) You will never have to worry about voting again.
Congress is already out of their role. Both houses, both parties. The Executive Branch isn’t lisening to the Courts. The Courts have no enforcement ability, and they have already arrested one. There is no other branch of government. Step 1) is already accomplished in the practical sense. Dictator…
Seeing that he has done step 1) effectively, I have lost all doubt that he meant Step 2) literally as well, and is quite capable of doing it. I’m waiting to see what form, Step 2) will take.
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I just wish that the people reporting on the sternly worded letters from judges, as if those letters actually have any weight to them, would wake the fuck up and stop pretending that the courts just Court Harder, we can stop fascism.
The master’s house can’t be dismantled with the master’s tools. And honestly I’m worried that the same people who think we can stop fascism with more court orders and letters, they’re going to be fine with a return to the status-quo of just a few months back, where people like JD Vance and Trump were able to legally spread lies without consequence about Haitian Immigrant communities that caused said communities to close schools, stop events, and wound up with hate groups marching in their neighborhoods.
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Here’s my question: Other than “lose the election”, what consequences would you have wanted them to face in a country where that kind of speech is legal? Like, I recognize that their lies were awful and deserve a reaction stronger than a shrug and a “what are you gonna do”, but their lies were also technically legal to say. I can’t think of any legal consequences that could be visited upon them for that shit, so…
…it kind of sounds like you’re on the verge of saying something that could very well get you (or Techdirt) a rather invasive visit from the feds.
And it’s not that I don’t understand the sentiment. Sometimes there are days where I, too, wish I could snap my fingers and dust a bunch of these assholes Thanos-style. It isn’t an uncommon thought. I still believe that peaceful solutions—yes, including letting the courts handle shit—should always be Plan A. But as someone who recently went into the WWE Hall of Fame once said: “There’s always a Plan B.”
That said: If you truly desire violence? Stop talking about it (or hinting at it) and go do it yourself. But if you’re not willing to take that step, stop admonishing others who don’t want to take that step. While people might share the “we’d all be better off if these fuckers were dead” sentiment, shaming them for not picking up the nearest implement of violence and making those fuckers dead makes you sound so bloodthirsty that you come off as weirder than the kind of people who think interpretive dance is a good method of protesting.
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I talked about it over here on this TD Comments Thread. Yeah, Vance and Trump should have been pulled from candidacy by other people in the GOP many times over for what they said on the trail and elsewhere, or they should have lost the election. As for legal consequences? The fact that the only way that the Haitian community in Springfield could have gotten any actual legal justice is if it came through a long, drawn-out, expensive trial to figure out if it was truly incitement to a pogrom, which it was, as was clear to any rational person who was watching the bomb threats and hatred unfold, is an indictment of the systems we have in place and how inadequate they are.
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Nothing is perfect. Our legal system can often be inadequate to deal with situations even as we recognize how horrific they are. But sometimes the inadequacy comes from the fact that trying to place responsibility on people for the actions of others—especially if there was no direct speech calling for those actions—is, in and of itself, a moral quagmire.
Say that someone says something about me that doesn’t contain even an indirect incitement of violence, but otherwise makes me look real fucking bad to a lot of people. One of those such people takes it upon themselves to drop by my home and teach me a lesson by beating me nearly to death. (The small number of y’all who are masturbating to that idea need to stop.) The person who beat me should obviously go to jail; that’s not a question at all.
But in re: the person who unintentionally incited their violence, the idea of how they should be punished gets trickier. Under this hypothetical, they didn’t say anything that so much as implied someone should visit violence upon me—and while it’s possible they defamed me, it’s also possible that they only exaggerated an actual truth about me, which would make their speech 100% lawful. How do you punish someone whose speech is lawful and doesn’t intend to incite violence but results in a third party committing violence anyway—and how do you do it without potentially chilling other people from saying true-yet-hurtful things on the basis that their speech will make them directly liable for the actions of a third party?
And I know what you or someone like you is going to say: “This wasn’t about that sort of thing! They were lying about the Haitians!” Yes, I’m aware of that. But did any of those fuckers actually say anything that could be considered incitement? Did they say anything to defame specific Haitians instead of broadly (and falsely) painting a group of Haitians in a negative light?
I’ve said before that I don’t like being in this position—i.e., I don’t like defending assholes doing asshole things. But if I’m going to have and hold onto principles such as “even assholes have rights”, I have to deal with being in that position and sounding like an asshole myself. That, too, is a moral quagmire. And I wish I didn’t have to sit in it, but here I am. The least you or anyone else can do is engage with the ideas I’ve put forth instead of calling me names or implying that, like J.D. Vance, I suck Donald Trump’s toes.
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The response to racist lies being lobbed at minority immigrant communities, lies that cause bomb threats and more, cannot be “I hate the assholes who caused you to fear for your mortal lives but, holding the liars who knew what they were doing responsible would be a complex moral quagmire”.
Trump & Vance lit the powder keg and told their hateful followers what community to roll it toward. Yeah, they didn’t specifically say “Target this specific Haitian Immigrant who lives at this address at this time”. But when someone running for election lies “These Haitian Immigrants in the city of Springfield, Ohio, are stealing people’s pets and eating them.”, that shit carries weight and every rational person knows what the person who said it wants people to do.
If you and others want to re-weave the social fabric of America into something better than it is now, and honestly into something better than it was before this, you are going to have to come to the realization that the people living here aren’t going to want to keep buying into the idea of America if it means someone can spread lies about them & their community that cause bomb threats and school evacuations out of legitimate fear for their lives, and they get “It’s complicated. Nothing is perfect. I hate these guys too, but…” in response.
A post-Trump post-Vance United States cannot go back to the kid-gloves treatment that we gave to hatred and those who spread it. Both societally, and legally. We cannot afford to go back, lest we allow all this to happen again.
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Then how do you propose holding them responsible without either changing the law to ban their speech in a way that would have to survive a 1A challenge and prevent a chilling effect on anyone else’s speech? Because that’s the moral quagmire here: We know their speech is heinous and revolting and all that, but how do we punish it without also spitting on the principles of free speech and attacking rights guaranteed by the First Amendment?
As I said, I don’t like being in this position. I know how it makes me look, especially to someone who is committed like hell to seeing me as a worthless scumbag who may as well be asking people to lie down and die. (I’m not doing that, I’ll never do that, and that’s an issue that doesn’t need exploring at this juncture.) But I can’t turn my back on the idea that even people I despise with every atom of my existence are entitled to the same civil rights as everyone else, including myself. To strip them of their civil rights because they’re “bad people” leaves my rights open to attack if someone in power thinks I’m a “bad person”.
Social punishments are somewhat easier to pull off because they don’t tend to involve the law. Legal punishments have to work within the letter of the law, even when they involve “technicalities” like “horrible people can’t be beaten into confessing crimes”. Therein lies my problem with the idea of punishing Trump and Vance for their comments about Haitian immigrants through the courts: How do you account for the law, as it is right now and not as you would want it to be in a hypothetical ideal, when you say you want to have them punished for their heinous speech?
You can snipe at me all you want by calling me a nutless coward or implying that I’m a right-wing plant or whatever the fuck gets you off. That’s your call. But it won’t answer the questions I’ve posed here, and if you’re too afraid of the answers you’d give if you sincerely engage with the questions I’ve asked, that’s your problem. Simple and clean, this ain’t—and mocking me won’t change that.
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To be frank, I don’t propose holding them responsible without changing the law. In a post-Trump, post-Vance United States where sane people are in power once again, we’re going to have to change the laws and the systems because the laws and the systems failed to keep fascism out of power. They were used to give fascism an easy ride to power. It’s as simple as that. If we don’t do that, it leaves a hole wide open for more fascism to seep in.
Germany changed its laws after WWII. We’re going to have to do the same. Whether on our own, which I would prefer, or more direly, under way of force of other democratic countries who have had enough of our shit and smack us down, just like post-WWII. Fascism and its boosters have to be made to face consequences. There’s no going back to the way that you want things to work, Stephen.
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Then how do you propose to change the law in a way that still aligns with the First Amendment? Because I’m not seeing a way to change the law to do what you want it to do without those changes violating 1A in some way, and good luck getting a Constitutional amendment to that amendment passed in this day and age.
I recognize that the United States will never be the same country it was before Trump. I recognize that we will have to make serious fucking changes—possibly including amendments to the Constitution—so we don’t get another Trump fucking us over.
But I also recognize that new guardrails will come with their own loopholes and perils, no matter the good intentions. And I also recognize that if you’re wanting to change laws around speech, you’re going to have a hard time convincing people (including me) that such changes are good if they could potentially chill currently legal speech because you want to go after “the bad guys”.
The problem you have when dealing with me is that I’m not willing to toss away my principles for the sake of hurting people I dislike. If I did that, they wouldn’t be principles—they’d be positions of convenience to be discarded in times of inconvenience. Wanting to protect the 1A rights of shitbirds like Trump and Vance is inconvenient; dropping my principles to say “yeah, sure, fuck ’em up in court no matter what” would be convenient, but it’d also be a betrayal of principles I hold close to my heart. Shit, dude, you could call me every mean name under the sun and I would still vouch for your right to speak without government intrusion. That’s how I roll.
And that’s the whole point of my questions: I want to see how you roll in the present. The future isn’t set and it hasn’t happened yet; for all you know, the U.S. might never change its laws in any meaningful way to prevent another fascist. You have to deal with reality as it is, not as you’d like it to be, which is why my questions are about the here-and-now. So if you have an answer for the present that you’re living in instead of the future you want to live in, by all means, share it. If you don’t, don’t bother replying—I’ve already heard what you want for the future, and repeating it won’t make it any more interesting.
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Like deplatforming isn’t a thing. Thanks for showing us how much you support the free speech rights of bigots over the rights of minorities to live peacefully yet again.
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It is, and I’ve made clear in the past that I don’t actually believe in the imagined right of “free reach”. And if you’d taken the time to read my comments instead of jumping on the first thing you can snipe at, you’d see that in the context of my comments, I was referring to legal consequences, not social consequences.
Tell me this: Without violating anyone’s civil rights and dealing with the law as it is right now instead of the law as you wish it were, how can the government legally silence bigots to help the targets of those bigots “live peacefully”—and how could it possibly do that without inviting a backlash that will result in far less peace for (and potentially violence against) those minority demographics?
And yes, this is about the government and the legal system. You talked about the “rights of bigots”, after all. And now that I think about it, I have another question: How can you expect to silence bigots without giving the government whatever tools it needs to silence you if it decides you’re a bigot?
I’ll note again, despite you seeming not to care, that I recognize the shitty position I’m in. Principles about civil rights tend to leave people stuck in moral quagmires because defending those rights means defending them for the worst of us. It’s like saying that a murderer or a rapist deserves a trial and a finding of fact that they’re guilty: Nothing about saying that makes anyone look good because the people saying it end up looking like they’re defending the actions of those bastards rather than civil rights. I don’t want to be in a position where I am defending the civil rights of a man I hate more than anything or anyone else in this entire world. But to defend my rights, and the rights of those he would target, I must be willing to defend his rights as well.
You can insult me, berate me, and attempt to shame me because I have principles instead of positions of convenience. But if you genuinely want to change my mind rather than unleash your anger about the Trump administration on me, give me an argument other than “you suck”. That’s the only way you’re ever going to get the job done. Either engage with my questions on a sincere level without any insults or go fuck yourself with an inanimate carbon rod—I don’t care which.
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Your position is bad and brain-dead. Especially now. America is a dictatorship. The First Amendment and other principles you hold so dear as to be a fetish, are what led us to this point. You need to deal with that. Post-Trump America is cannot afford to be as kind to the First Amendment and its acolytes such as you have been.
So how do we know Pam Bondi and the people under her are not gang members that need to be deported. Couldn’t an officer arrest her under suspension? I mean she is breaking the law by telling her people to break the law and as far as I know she belongs to a gang that is bent on dismantling the constitution so…
Sucks when due process isn’t followed. But yet again this won’t happen to her or anyone in the government. Unless they really passed off dear leader.
This all sounds like the sort of thing a member of Tren de Aragon or whatever would say. To the gulag with you.
You see his latest “Strengthening and Unleashing America’s Law Enforcement..” EO stupidity?
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“It’s there to be pencil-whipped by willing participants in the administration’s racial cleansing program.”
Always making everything about race. This is why people don’t take you seriously.
Re: YES THE RACE CARD!
The Trump Regime is making it be about race, if not in word then by deed.
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“This is why people don’t take you seriously.”
The level projection room here is chefs kiss
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The drunk Donnie hired to lead the DoD has gang-related tattoos, which is what they’re using justify sending a random civilian to a mega prison.
Guess what the biggest difference between the the two is.
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Tell me: How many of the recent rash of high-profile arrests/snatchings in regards to immigration law have been done to people who could reasonably be referred to as “people of European descent”, and how many of them have been done to people with “foreign-sounding” names and/or skin colors that belong on the bottom of that one Family Guy chart? Because it seems like the only people getting yoinked by ICE and having their detentions/deportations publicized, which includes a bizarre “heads on pikes”-type display at the White House are people who fit that second group.
If you’re going to imply that right-wing anger over immigration is about anything other than racism inspired by “browning of America” rhetoric, you should be prepared to prove it.