Immigration home raids gone awry

It could’ve been a scene out of a dark comedy movie.

Except that this one’s for real.

In a widely reported incident captured on camera two weeks ago in Minnesota, a 56-year-old naturalized US citizen from Laos, barely clothed and wearing only Crocs and shorts, was dragged into the snow by armed immigration agents after they forcibly entered his home.

The reason: The agents were looking to arrest a couple of immigrants convicted of sex offenses with final orders of removal.

According to the man’s relatives, one of the alleged offenders used to live in the house as the ex-husband of a family member, but had since moved out.

In defending the agents’ actions, the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) described the arrest and detention as a “standard protocol to hold all individuals in a house of an operation for the safety of the public and law enforcement.”

As the story goes, the wrongfully detained man, who was singing karaoke when the agents arrived, allegedly refused to be fingerprinted and facially identified and thus had to be dragged out of the house and forced into the agents’ vehicle to have his identity verified.

The man said he was released a few hours later without any explanation or apology, presumably after a clean record check.

The above followed last year’s incident in Hawaii in which armed agents barged into a house early one morning to serve a warrant against an alleged criminal alien. In this case, about a dozen teachers from the Philippines, all holding valid non-immigrant J status, some with children, as well as a naturalized US citizen, were detained for almost an hour.

A few were forced to stand outside the house, half-dressed, with blankets on and wet hair.

Despite voluntarily offering to show their IDs in order to be cleared and released quickly, the teachers were restrained of their liberty until the agents left.

It turned out that the targeted individual was a former tenant who had already moved out of the house more than a year prior to the raid.

Based on the above incidents, a clear trend is emerging: Under the current immigration climate, residing in a dwelling currently, or even formerly, inhabited by an individual in the DHS’ crosshairs is no longer a harmless undertaking.

Coincidentally, under an official DHS memo issued last year which only became public recently, immigration agents now possess the authority to enter private homes to effectuate an immigration law arrest using an administrative warrant, as opposed to a judicial warrant.

Since an administrative warrant is issued by the DHS itself, often by immigration agents themselves and not by an impartial judge or magistrate as in the case of a judicial warrant, it lacks the independent pre-issuance review and balancing test required for weighing the citizens’ constitutional right to home privacy against the state’s interest in enforcing its police power.

Bucking that view is the DHS’ stance that since the warrant is based on a final order of removal issued by an immigration judge or tribunal, a probable cause already exists for the warrant’s issuance.

Unfortunately, unless and until the controversial memo is rescinded or recalled, living in a compromised abode is deemed too risky a move in today’s highly charged environment.