The Bill of Rights provides no exception to the requirement for warrants issued by a judge to justify arrest of any person. That judge needs to be a member of the independent judiciary—not an executive branch staff-person posing as a judge to expedite summary sentencing for the purposes of mass detention and deportation.

Federal judges keep ruling that warrants are needed. They cite the 4th Amendment, which requires warrants for any search or “seizure”, which includes detention of a person.

They also cite the 5th Amendment, which says “No person shall be… deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law…” No. Person. Not one human being, in any case.

The standard set by the Bill of Rights is simple, unequivocal and clear: It is a criminal use of public authority to arbitrarily detain, summarily sentence, and subject people to punishment, without due process of law, including judicial review of evidence and of the details of the process used in the case in question.

The 6th Amendment clearly says that people may not be transferred out of the state without judicial review. It is not lawful to grab people from streets, homes, hospitals, and vehicles, based solely on their apparent race or ancestry, and to summarily sentence them to extrajudicial detention far from their home and community.

The First Amendment protects the right of all people to be witnesses. Religious faith, speech and thought, information gathering and reporting, assembly and protest, and the right to legal redress—all five of the foundational freedoms of the First Amendment, all of which are universal, unalienable, and irreducible, are forms of witness.

Because warrants must issue only upon evidence, and because due process requires the calling of witnesses (specifically protected by the 6th Amendment), the Bill of Rights necessitates the five foundational freedoms, as ways of securing the right to bear witness, and the 4th Amendment prohibition on arbitrary seizure of people and documents.

The Bill of Rights outlaws summary detention, outlaws summary sentencing, outlaws cruelty, and makes it absolutely unacceptable and unlawful to use public authority to interfere with, menace, or retaliate against witnesses.

Judicial warrants are needed, before the full power of the state can be exercised against any person. Witnesses have a sacred duty and can never be subjected to menace or retaliation, including those witnesses who simply act as examples of public conscience. That is the law. That is what makes the United States “a free country”.

The government cannot hide unlawful actions, and it cannot punish witnesses or make up charges. Every person can be a witness and is obliged to tell the truth about what they have seen and what they know. This is fundamental to the prevention of tyrannical and abusive government.

There are unique circumstances, where a crime is in progress, there is a call to 911, and police witness the crime in progress, where an arrest can be made without first securing a warrant from a judge. In those cases, depending on the timing of events, a warrant might be issued before the arrest is completed, or a probable cause hearing will be held before a judge to determine whether the arrest was appropriate and whether detention should continue.

This allows the people to ensure that due process has been afforded, that public authority was not used abusively, and that it is a genuine criminal suspect, and not an innocent person, that has been detained. Even in the case of a person suspected of the most serious crimes, proseuction cannot proceed unless a grand jury indicts them and they are convicted by a trial jury.

Arbitrary detention and summary sentencing are not just inappropriate, abusive, and unlawful; they oppose the very purpose of the Constitution of the United States and the American Revolution that made it possible.

When federal agencies and allies in Congress falsely claim some people can be snatched from communities, without a warrant from a judge authorizing their arrest, they are saying the Bill of Rights can be selectively applied, and due process is optional.

Due process is not optional.

• It is illegal to snatch people walking their dogs, getting off buses, buying groceries, picking up their kids from school, or seeking medical care, unless there is a warrant for that arrest.
• It is illegal for federal agents to invade a courtroom or administrative hearing and arbitrarily detain a person who is following the legal process and has been allowed by a judge to remain in the country.
• It is illegal for the President to issue orders that pretend to be ex post facto law (changing the law after the fact), to justify violations of the Bill of Rights.
• Executive orders can only be lawful if they are faithful to the Constitution and to written law; Article I, Section 9, outlaws the establishment of any ex post facto law.

We do not live in a dictatorship. The President is a high-ranking bureaucrat, an administrator whose responsibilities are limited to faithfully operating at all times within the scope of written law. The President cannot invent new powers; the President cannot issue orders that violate any part of the Constitution, any aspect of federal law, or any human rights.

On the subject of whether people suspected of being immigrants without permanent legal status, the government must present that suspicion, with evidence, to a judge. If the person accused has been following a legal process, even if that process was set in motion under a previous president, that process cannot be interfered with by the President or his agents.

People following a legal process are not in violation of any law. No person is “illegal”.

If the rights of people accused of paperwork violations can be revoked, allowing them to be subjected to violent paramilitary raids, secret abductions, transfers to faraway prison camps, and other summary punishments, then your rights can be voided as well. Rights are universal; that makes you free.

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ADDITIONAL CONTEXT

The Capitol Hill testimony from US citizen victims of brutal ICE and CBP actions aligns with new reporting about the decision by the current administration to use special operations units normally used for raids on dangerous drug gangs along the border in residential neighborhoods where no such activity is even suspected. According to WIRED Magazine: 

The brutal tactics of SRT and BORTAC units seem to have spread into ICE and CBP as a whole. Over the last year, these DHS agencies have morphed into a masked, seemingly unaccountable force that detains children, separates families, blows open doors, snatches teachers and parents from schools and day care centers, and kills unarmed protesters who were simply voicing dissent or recording the mayhem.

It is clear from the extreme circumstances in which those units and their tactics were intended to be used, to confront mass-murdering cartels and their affiliates, judicial warrants would be needed, to first, clarify who is being targeted and what evidence there is that they pose such a threat, and second, to make sure innocent families are not being subjected to terror, in violation of the Bill of Rights.

Allowing anyone in American law enforcement, including these special ops units, to use brutal violence when there is no warrant from a judge even identifying the person or place to be searched or the people to be detained, is a betrayal of the oath to uphold the Constitution. No one willing to permit such abuses should be able to remain in office or avoid prosecution.