[Infowarrior] - Confidential ICE Handbook Lays Out Paths for Investigators to Avoid Constitutional Challenges

[Richard Forno]

Confidential ICE Handbook Lays Out Paths for Investigators to Avoid Constitutional Challenges
Eoin Higgins

February 23 2018, 9:53 a.m.

When U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents go after suspected violators of immigration and customs law, they do whatever they can to get consent from their targets. The idea is simple: By getting their targets’ consent, ICE agents can avoid the complications that arise from the Fourth Amendment’s protections against unreasonable searches and seizures.

Internal policies, laid out in documents reviewed by The Intercept, show how the agency’s investigative wing, Homeland Security Investigations, uses a complex web of civil and criminal warrants, statutory regulations, and legal tactics to effectively operate with as few restrictions as possible across the country.

Protecting agents’ work from constitutional challenges is one of the focuses of the “HSI Search and Seizure Handbook.” The techniques laid out focus heavily on obtaining consent from investigative targets for searches. One method available to agents is to issue “ICE warrants,” which do not carry the power of judicial warrants, but which immigration lawyers warn can be used to mislead or intimidate targets into granting consent for search and seizure.

The handbook was published on Thursday by the independent media outlet Unicorn Riot. The August 18, 2010, version of the policy document published is no longer in use: A table of contents from the HSI’s 2016 Special Agents Manual shows that an updated edition, from 2012, was being used as recently as two years ago.

“ICE is known to use deceptive tactics.”
The handbook lays out ICE’s underhanded methods, said immigration lawyers and experts contacted by The Intercept, stoking fears that ICE is willing to dismiss legal protections in the face of a single-minded drive to detain suspects. “ICE is known to use deceptive tactics,” said Azadeh Shahshahani, the legal and advocacy director for Atlanta-based immigration organization Project South. “These types of practices, bas

< - >

https://theintercept.com/2018/02/23/ice-search-seizure-handbook-manual-secret/