By Nate Raymond

BOSTON, Jan 30 (Reuters) – Immigrant rights advocates filed a lawsuit on Friday challenging a recently disclosed policy adopted by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement allowing its officers to enter the homes of people suspected of living in the United States illegally without a judicial warrant.

The lawsuit by the Greater Boston Latino Network and Brazilian Worker Center was filed in federal court in Boston and marked the first case to challenge the constitutionality of a policy laid out in a May memo ICE issued that became public last week as a result of a whistleblower complaint. 

The policy marked a departure for ICE, whose agents in the past had generally been barred from entering private homes and businesses without a warrant signed by a federal judge.

But as President Donald Trump’s administration ramped up immigration enforcement last year in its quest to carry out mass deportations, the acting head of ICE issued a memo that advised its agents they could rely instead on administrative warrants.

Those warrants, also known as Form I-205s, are issued by officials within the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, including ones in ICE itself.

The lawsuit argues that allowing ICE officers to enter someone’s home to conduct arrests, even with force, based solely on such an administrative warrant violates the U.S. Constitution’s Fourth Amendment, which protects against unreasonable searches and seizures.

Lawyers for the plaintiffs said the new policy eliminated a guardrail designed to protect people’s rights as ICE escalates enforcement operations in numerous states including Minnesota with aggressive tactics that several judges had ruled unlawful.

Federal agents shot and killed two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis this month during protests against the crackdown against illegal immigration.

Brooke Simone, an attorney for the plaintiffs at the group Lawyers for Civil Rights, in a statement said the Fourth Amendment “exists precisely to prevent government agents from breaking into people’s homes without any judicial process or oversight.”

The DHS did not respond to a request for comment, but a spokesperson has previously said those served with administrative warrants “have had full due process and a final order of removal from an immigration judge.”

The May 12 memo was issued by Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons and was disclosed earlier this month to the news media as a result of a whistleblower complaint filed by the civil liberties advocacy group Whistleblower Aid.

Lyons in the memo said DHS Office of General Counsel had “recently determined the U.S. Constitution, the Immigration and Nationality Act, and the immigration regulations do not prohibit relying on administrative warrants for this purpose.”

(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston, Editing by Alexia Garamfalvi and Alistair Bell)

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