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Federal immigration law authorizes administrative arrest and removal warrants that ICE agents can issue internally and use to detain people
ICE’s statutory authority is focused on enforcing federal immigration law: the agency can question, briefly detain with reasonable suspicion, arrest noncitizens it believes are in the country unlawful...
ICE’s official posture and federal law make a clear legal line: immigration authorities do not have the civil power to arrest and detain lawful U.S. citizens as part of removal proceedings . Neverthel...
Federal law does not create a general obligation for U.S. citizens to carry or show proof of citizenship in public, and ICE (a federal immigration agency) has statutory authority to question, detain o...
Federal prosecutors most commonly rely on 18 U.S.C. § 111 (assaulting, resisting, or impeding certain officers) and obstruction statutes in Title 18 — frequently cited is 18 U.S.C. § 1503 (obstruction...
ICE administrative (or removal) warrants are internal agency documents signed by immigration officials rather than judges and authorize ICE to arrest a person believed removable, but they do not, by t...
Administrative ICE warrants are agency-issued documents—signed by DHS or ICE officials rather than judges—that authorize immigration officers to detain or remove an individual but, unlike judicial war...
New ICE law‑enforcement hires receive a mix of classroom, tactical and firearms instruction at the ICE Academy operated inside the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center (FLETC) in Glynco, Georgia, s...
ICE may detain a person in public when officers have statutory authority and either a warrant or probable cause that the individual is removable or has committed a federal offense, but the agency’s po...
Yes — ICE agents can and have physically detained people who are U.S. citizens when agents believe those people are not citizens, and such detention can be prolonged until citizenship is proved or a c...
Administrative ICE warrants are internal immigration documents signed by ICE or DHS officials that authorize immigration officers to arrest or effect a removal order but are not reviewed or signed by ...
ICE’s public data classifies people it arrests into discrete criminal-history buckets—those with U.S. criminal convictions, those with pending criminal charges, and a residual “other immigration viola...
ICE can lawfully prolong a traffic stop or detain vehicle occupants without a judicial warrant only when federal statutory authority and the Fourth Amendment’s standards are met — most critically, whe...
Most people in ICE custody today lack criminal convictions because immigration enforcement is a civil process that can detain people for immigration violations, recent enforcement priorities and large...
The 1996 immigration statutes—most notably the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA)—reconfigured U.S. deportation law by replacing the old exclusion/deportation framewo...
The most common probable cause ICE cites to detain someone is that the person is "subject to removal"—frequently grounded in criminal convictions or immigration-related final orders—but in practice th...
Official public reporting does not publish a single, authoritative tally of how many lawful permanent residents (LPRs, “green card” holders) were removed in FY2025, and the federal sources released fo...
Green card holders (lawful permanent residents, LPRs) and U.S. citizens both have constitutional protections during encounters with ICE, including the right to remain silent, but the practical legal o...
A congressional probe seeking to prove marriage‑based immigration fraud would assemble documentary, testimonial, and digital evidence demonstrating that the marriage was entered into primarily to circ...
Federal and tribal leaders say ICE arrests on or near reservation lands have sparked legal fights and a political uproar, but reporting and legal commentary show the question remains legally unsettled...
Prosecutorial-discretion memoranda — internal guidance from an administration about whom to target for arrest, detention and removal — shape ICE’s day‑to‑day priorities but operate against a fixed sta...