Honestly my friends, I'm running out of new ways to say that the Trump administration are a bunch of lawless fascists whose maximalist views on power put them in direct opposition to a US constitution and American legal tradition that is on the whole, extremely friendly to the exercise of executive power. There appears to be no article of law, no regulation, no rule they won't violate in their objectively nazi quest to create a white ethnostate; at this point I half expect the Trump regime to try to find a workaround to the rarely-remembered Third Amendment so they can force every American family to quarter an ICE agent in their home.
If you think I'm being hyperbolic, keep in mind that I'm only going off the information the Trump regime writes down in its own internal memos. Take for example this Department of Justice guideline arguing that ICE has the legal authority to conduct warrantless home invasions in search of "suspected" Venezuelan gang members, because Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act as a kind of Uno-reverso card to every piece of civil rights legislation in US history.
https://www.commondreams.org/news/ice-warrantless-search
DOJ Memo Shows Trump Admin Ordered ICE to Conduct Warrantless Home Invasions
"Lee Gelernt, the ACLU's lead counsel in cases challenging use of the AEA, told USA Today: "The administration's unprecedented use of a wartime authority during peacetime was bad enough. Now we find out the Justice Department was authorizing officers to ignore the most bedrock principle of the Fourth Amendment by authorizing officers to enter homes without a judicial warrant."
Monique Sherman, an attorney at the Rocky Mountain Immigrant Advocacy Network, expressed alarm over the DOJ memo.
"The home under all constitutional law is the most sacred place where you have a right to privacy," Sherman told USA Today. "By this standard, spurious allegations of gang affiliation means the government can knock down your door."
As Georgetown University Law Center professor Steve Vladeck said, "There's no Alien Enemies Act exception to the Fourth Amendment."
As I've indicated elsewhere, I'm not a lawyer; but as someone who has spent many years studying fascism, authoritarianism, and police states, I'm pretty sure you don't issue a Department of Justice order like that unless you *intend* to use ICE to start going house to house in American communities; and once a fascist government has granted itself the power to do that, it really doesn't matter why they claim they're doing so anymore. This is quite literally the beginnings of the dystopian police state winger prepper reactionaries are always going on about, and in anything resembling a functioning democracy US Attorney General Pam Bondi would be arrested immediately for even signing it. As both the article and your middle school civics class note, absolutely none of this is legal no matter what ancient laws Trump tries to invoke and the DoJ is basically telling ICE to ignore the Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution, "because we say so."
The question then remains, does the Trump regime even care if the fascist bullshit they're doing is legal? Even under a Calvinball winger interpretation of US law? Signals on that front are so far mixed; on one hand the regime continues arguing its nonsensical theories in court, but on the other hand they stand in violation of several court orders already and are for example, making no effort to bring Abrego Garcia home from a torture prison in El Salvador, despite a 9-0 SCOTUS ruling that they must do so.
On some level I imagine that ICE goons might ignore a DoJ order that tells them to violate the Constitution, but the reason Trump has always used ICE as his personal Gestapo gives me pause. The agency self-selects for nativists who don't mind authoritarian repression or violence, and Trump's vast power over immigration matters as president, means ICE is largely his to control - at least through a Department of Homeland Security the regime has stacked full of white nationalists and fascist freaks. In other words, I don't really know what happens if and when the Trump regime orders ICE to go for the full V for Vendetta experience; but it probably isn't good, and I'm not keen on finding out if Der Leader's private Gestapo cares about the Constitution at all.
I'm not a psychic, but it is increasingly becoming clear to me that the fascist Trump administration knows it cannot accomplish its goals without a loyal, empowered, and ideologically aligned force of police state thugs. The fact that they're casting about the margins of the US legal system to empower ICE to be that army of goons, tells you they have plans to use that power. For what? I don't know, but authoritarian police state powers to enter American homes to fight a made up war against "gangs," have far more potential uses to a fascist regime than just mass deportations.
