An anonymous whistleblower disclosed a confidential internal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) policy directive to the office of Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) on January 7. The directive authorizes ICE officers to enter the homes of people present in the U.S. without legal status, and arrest them on the basis of an administrative warrant (Form I-205) issued by a supervisory officer within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
The whistleblower alleges that the directive differs significantly from traditional ICE policy, which has historically required a warrant signed by a judge to enter a residence. ICE’s 2023 Fugitive Operations Handbook, for example, explicitly states that an I-205 does not authorize officers to enter a target’s residence or another location in which the target has a “reasonable expectation of privacy.” A Congressional Research Service (CRS) Report in June 2025 came to the same conclusion. The memo, released internally to ICE personnel a month before the CRS report was publicized, directly addresses this departure from past procedure.
“Although the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has not historically relied on administrative warrants alone to arrest aliens subject to final orders of removal in their place of residence,” the memo reads, “the DHS Office of the General Counsel has recently determined that the U.S. Constitution, the Immigration and Nationality Act, and the immigration regulations do not prohibit relying on administrative warrants for this purpose.”
ICE had not publicized this change in its understanding of warrant requirements prior to the whistleblower’s disclosure. The whistleblower alleges that the memo was kept largely confidential even within the agency. According to their disclosure, the memo was provided to select DHS officials, who then verbally briefed lower-ranking officers on the policy. The whistleblower also claims that new ICE agents are being trained to follow this policy and explicitly disregard written course materials containing the opposite instructions, and that at least one official who received the memo was threatened with retaliation if they objected to the new policy.
Sen. Blumenthal published a letter on January 21to Kristy Noem, the secretary of DHS, and Todd Lyons, the acting director of ICE, in response to the disclosure. Blumenthal describes the policy as a “secret policy to ignore the Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution” and an example of “flagrant disregard for the lawful protections that have safeguarded the American public and our democracy for the last 250 years.” He demands that DHS release information on the memo’s distribution and use within ICE, as well as a list of current litigation against DHS for Fourth Amendment violations.
The whistleblower’s disclosure has been covered by the Associated Press, NPR, and The Washington Post. As of January 27, DHS and its component agencies have not publicly responded to the leaked memo or Blumenthal’s letter.
