ICE was taking notes on a criminal f--king conspiracy

Minneapolis remained under siege from its own government today, with ICE and Border Patrol agents randomly assaulting both nonwhite residents and the observers who continue to record them. The courts are, as usual, taking their own sweet time on questions like "are government thugs allowed to literally kidnap American citizens off the street and imprison them for days based purely on their skin color"—so far, the highest legal authority to weigh in on that one has been Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, whose half-assed muttering in a previous case has now made his name synonymous with such abuses.

The part that continues to baffle me, and more importantly continues to baffle people with actual knowledge of law, is how exactly a group of thugs led by Border Patrol goblin Greg Bovino and egged on by white nationalist Stephen Miller and openly neo-Nazi Homeland Security memelords has managed to seemingly erase the 4th Amendment of the Constitution, the one that bars "unreasonable searches and seizures" and blocks government from breaking into your house or stealing your property without a warrant.

It's a terse, one-sentence prohibition with not a lot of wiggle room to it, which is leaving a hell of a lot of people confused as to why an ethnic cleansing operation specifically targeting American citizens and residents based on perceived race is allowed to snatch people from their homes, places of work, gas stations, and public sidewalks, inflict injuries, and steal their groceries or smartphones. It would appear to be a straightforward breach of the 4th Amendment even if it wasn't being done at such scale that it shuts down an entire regional economy, and seems especially "unreasonable" especially given that our White House chucklefucks premised the whole enterprise, as usual, on flagrant disinformation and lies.

So the big question, then, is how long it's going to take various courtrooms to politely explain to those selfsame chucklefucks that everything about this program is unconstitutional—or for the Supreme Court to once again reach down to say that the joke's on us, the new Roberts Rules are that the state is allowed to tackle you, beat you to a pulp, throw you in an unlicensed and dangerous detention center for a few days until they get around to identifying who you are and whether they were allowed to jail you in the first place, and maybe let you go later if your family figures out where you've gone and can afford a lawyer.

It's wild that it hasn't happened yet, but that's the whole reason we're here. The Heritage Foundation's fascist Project 2025 was premised on the knowledge that courts move slowly but authoritarian decrees move quickly, and baked into the project's strategy is a "flood the zone" approach of doing so many flagrantly illegal things at once that by the time the courts and Congress figure out which parts are covered by which laws, most of the damage is already irreversible.

That was the plan. That remains the plan. And it's gone even better than the anti-democracy zealots at Heritage and other far-right think tanks likely thought it would because, it turns out, the Senate and House of Representatives are literally too corrupt to serve any useful constitutional role at all.

There's a direct line from Project 2025's fascist plan to intentionally break laws to an extent that the courts can't easily respond to and the Minneapolis assaults. And, thanks to a new whistleblower report, we now seem to have proof of it.

A new Associated Press report reveals a secret ICE memo asserting a new power to forcibly enter homes "without a judicial warrant, consent, or an emergency."

That's a direct violation of the plain text of the 4th Amendment, of Supreme Court precedent, and of ICE's own training documents. And, perhaps most notably, the memo appears to be treated as secret even within ICE.

The memo is addressed to all ICE personnel. But it has been shown only to “select DHS officials” who then shared it with some employees who were told to read it and return it, Whistleblower Aid wrote in the disclosure.

One of the two whistleblowers was allowed to view the memo only in the presence of a supervisor and then had to give it back. That person was not allowed to take notes. A whistleblower was able to access the document and lawfully disclose it to Congress, Whistleblower Aid said.

Again, this new policy directly contradicts ICE's own written training materials. And it appears that trainers are being told to teach from the new, secret memo that they're not allowed to keep or share with others rather than the established policy.

What this appears to be, unless White House officials manage to pull a particularly spectacular unicorn out of their behinds, is a criminal conspiracy to nullify the 4th Amendment rights of both specific ICE targets and anyone who happens to be in the general area at the time. Under long-established law, a judicial warrant is required to make forcible entry into someone's home. The intent is to set a universal baseline for what can be considered "reasonable," and to get a judicial warrant government officials must, for example:

1. Know the name of the person they're seeking
2. Be able to articulate a legal reason for arresting them
3. Provide evidence that the person has some identifiable connection to the residence they want to enter

Those are pretty minimal asks, but the new, "secret" ICE memo insists that home invasions may be conducted with administrative warrants signed by the agents themselves. That means there's no judge to question whether Agent Roidrage actually does have the right name and the right house.

What we're seeing instead, in Minnesota, is Bovino and his agents apparently making door-to-door sweeps, breaking down doors with no warrant or proof that a named target is inside.

We've also heard repeated assertions from residents that agents demanded they single out the homes of nonwhite neighbors—not of specific named people, as a warrant requires, but of anyone of a targeted apparent race.

At best, it may mean Bovino's thugs are using the name of any known ICE target to justify sweeps of multiple homes at once. Or it may be that ICE agents have no targets, and instead are searching only for nonwhite residents while coming up with supposed names after a target home has been identified.

The secrecy of this new memo is significant. There's really no better way to signal to a judge that you knew you were taking part in an illegal conspiracy than to tell everyone involved they're not allowed to write down the orders you're giving them. And the memo itself appears to make no plausible argument for the sudden disappearance of the 4th Amendment; ICE Acting Director Todd Lyons asserts only that "the DHS Office of the General Counsel has recently determined" that the Constitution and other laws "do not prohibit" the new secret policy.

That is an official way of saying "we Trump appointees pulled this out of our ass." It's not legally binding, and the way you know the Department of Homeland Security itself doesn't think it can stand up to any serious scrutiny is because they appear to have taken great pains to MAKE SURE NO JUDGE WOULD FIND OUT ABOUT THE POLICY.

That's the Heritage/Project 2025 model: Proclaim that now your government loyalists can do a widely-understood-to-be-illegal thing because Screw You, That's Why, while attempting to block federal judges from issuing rulings—or even catching wind of—those new orders for as long as possible. Even if federal courts do eventually rule that the vast majority of these Bovino-led assaults were illegal, how long will it take? And how many people will be illegally deported, detained, brutalized, or shot before it happens?

Government officials have, in general, broad protections from criminal charges. Border Patrol agents can go door-to-door murdering people in Maine or Minnesota without fearing anything more than a professional slapping down in courtrooms; it is hard if not impossible to dole out legal consequences to the individuals doing the shooting.

That needs to change. What we're witnessing in Minnesota is, unabashedly, an attempted ethnic purge. The agents aren't plucking people off the streets over suspected immigration violations: They're instead targeting nonwhite Minnesotans broadly, tackling them, putting them into cars, running their papers and dumping them on the street again if they can't come up with a reason to detain them for longer. It's a white nationalist operation being undertaken by, in at least some cases, tattooed white nationalists; these officers are using their government positions as color for violence.

Unless we really are a fascist nation—something that now appears to rest in the hands of John Roberts, a Supreme Court ideological goon squad, and the same House and Senate Republicans who are so far turning a blind eye to murdered moms and kidnapped children so as to better please President Make-a-Wish—courts will, eventually, put a stop to this. And when that happens, Bovino, Todd Lyons, Pam Bondi, Kristi Noem, and every federal agent participating in these operations needs face personal legal consequences for their parts in it.

We had better damn well be able to do that much, or the Project 2025 formula of brazenly ignoring the Constitution until someone, somewhere gets around to stopping you will become the new means of American governance going forward. And this nation simply can't survive that. Not legally, and God knows not morally.