One of the sticking points in the standoff between Democrats and Republicans over funding for the Department of Homeland Security has been the Trump administration’s expanded use of administrative warrants to forcibly enter people’s homes to make immigration arrests. Democrats argue the new DHS policy runs afoul of the Constitution and have demanded immigration officers obtain judicial warrants — a higher legal bar that requires a judge’s approval — to forcibly enter a home.
The Trump administration contends that immigrants in the country illegally who have received a final order of removal from immigration judges are not entitled to Fourth Amendment protections — a position many immigration law experts dispute. And several lawmakers have argued that the additional requirement for judicial warrants would significantly curtail immigration enforcement efforts.
Funding for DHS lapsed on Feb. 14 as Republicans have balked at Democrats’ demands to rein in several immigration enforcement measures. Among other requests, Democrats are asking for a ban on ICE agents wearing masks, requirements for displaying identification and using body-worn cameras, and the use of judicial warrants on private property. As Congress failed to pass legislation on Feb. 13, parts of DHS, including the Transportation Security Administration, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and Coast Guard, will be affected by the lapse in funding. ICE has enough money to keep operating due to billions in funding from the Republicans’ One Big Beautiful Bill Act, passed last summer.
Debate over the use of administrative versus judicial warrants has emerged as one of the main impediments in the negotiations.
During a press conference on Jan. 30, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries emphasized that Democrats would “not walk away from” their demand that “judicial warrants should be required before ICE can storm homes and rip people out of their cars.” On Feb. 4, Jeffries joined Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer in writing a letter to House Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune to propose “targeted enforcement,” where “DHS officers cannot enter private property without a judicial warrant.” In the letter, Jeffries and Schumer proposed 10 “common sense solutions that protect constitutional rights and ensure responsible law enforcement.”
Meanwhile, during a Feb. 1 interview on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Republican Sen. Ron Johnson called the Democrats’ demand for judicial warrants “completely unacceptable,” stating that “immigration has always been enforced through administrative warrants.” Also, on Feb. 3, House Speaker Johnson said that “adding an entirely new layer of judicial warrants” was “unimplementable.”
We’ll explain the differences between the two types of warrants and how the Trump administration’s use of administrative warrants has departed from past practices.
Judicial vs. Administrative Warrants
According to the National Immigration Law Center, judicial warrants are “formal written [orders] authorizing a law enforcement officer to make an arrest, a seizure, or a search.” They are issued by state and federal courts and signed by judges or magistrate judges. As these warrants allow search, seizures and arrests on private property, they are more specific than administrative warrants, and include details like the address, time frame and targets of the search.
Administrative warrants authorize law enforcement officers with federal agencies to make an arrest or seizure, but not a search. “An administrative warrant does not confer authority to enter a home or private area,” the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service explained in a 2021 report, linking to a 2007 DHS letter.
“Administrative warrants are not reviewed or signed by a federal judge or even an immigration judge, they are reviewed and signed by immigration officers,” John Gihon, an immigration attorney and past chair of the American Immigration Lawyers Association Central Florida Chapter, told us in an email.
There are two forms of administrative warrants, known as I-200 and I-205 forms. According to the American Immigration Council, I-200 forms are issued to arrest “anyone federal agents believe to be present in the United States in violation of federal immigration law.” Conversely, the I-205 form “authorizes an immigration officer to arrest and deport someone who has previously been ordered removed from the United States.”
Under the Trump administration, immigration arrests by ICE have increased considerably, and agents can more quickly obtain administrative, versus judicial, warrants, experts said.
Regarding Speaker Johnson’s characterization of judicial warrant requirements as “unimplementable,” Kathleen Bush-Joseph, a lawyer and U.S. immigration policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, told us in a phone interview that when you consider “the number of arrests that the Department of Homeland Security says that they made last year, which is in the hundreds of thousands … if they had to get judicial warrants for all of those people, that would certainly be a significant administrative burden.”
Historically, Sen. Johnson’s statement that immigration enforcement has “always” been conducted with administrative warrants is accurate. According to Gihon, “immigration law has always been enforced through [administrative] warrants,” as “[u]nder the Immigration and Nationality Act, a judicial warrant is not required to make an immigration arrest.”
However, the Trump administration has determined — contrary to the practice of previous administrations — that administrative warrants allow immigration officers to “arrest illegal aliens with final orders of removal in their homes,” as DHS has said. This position has raised concerns about the Fourth Amendment.
Fourth Amendment and Rights of Noncitizens
The Fourth Amendment protects “[t]he right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.” That has historically prevented immigration agents with only an administrative warrant from forcibly entering homes.
In an analysis updated on Feb. 4, Hannah James, a counsel in the Brennan Center for Justice’s Liberty and National Security Program, wrote that “the home receives the highest protection under the Fourth Amendment,” and reiterated that the ability to enter a home with a judicial versus an administrative warrant is “very different from a Fourth Amendment perspective.”
However, in January, the Associated Press obtained a leaked May 12, 2025, memo written by Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons, in which he said: “Although the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has not historically relied on administrative warrants alone to arrest aliens subject to final orders of removal in their place of residence, the DHS Office of General Counsel has recently determined that the U.S. Constitution, the Immigration and Nationality Act, and the immigration regulations do not prohibit relying on administrative warrants for this purpose.”
Lyons was referring to the I-205 warrants, which target noncitizens with a final order of removal. According to an American Immigration Council fact sheet, final orders of removal are issued when “an immigration judge finds a noncitizen to be removable” and the noncitizen fails to file an appeal within 30 days, waives the right to appeal or has an appeal dismissed by the Board of Immigration Appeals. The government can then choose to execute the removal order, where it notifies the noncitizen to surrender to ICE for deportation or face arrest.
In using the I-205 warrant, the DHS memo said, immigration officers should knock on a resident’s door and identify themselves. Then, they should “allow those inside the residence a reasonable chance to act lawfully. Should the alien refuse admittance, ICE officers and agents should use only a necessary and reasonable amount of force to enter the alien’s residence, following proper notification of the officer’s or agent’s authority and intent to enter.”
In a Feb. 4 DHS press release setting “the record straight on administrative warrants,” DHS stated that there is “broad judicial recognition that illegal aliens aren’t entitled to the same Fourth Amendment protections as U.S. citizens.” Accordingly, the press release said, “While administrative warrants may satisfy the Fourth Amendment for any arrest of an illegal alien, ICE currently uses these warrants to enter an illegal alien’s residence only when the alien has received a final order of removal from an Immigration Judge.”
Therefore, immigration enforcement agencies have claimed the power to use administrative warrants to enter private homes to arrest noncitizens with final orders of removal. However, immigration experts told us this interpretation runs contrary to constitutional protections, particularly the Fourth Amendment.
Bush-Joseph told us that “the understanding had been that immigrants, like U.S. citizens, were protected by the Fourth Amendment from forcible entry into their homes without a judicial warrant.”
James wrote that the Supreme Court “has never held, nor suggested, that undocumented immigrants within the United States receive lesser Fourth Amendment protection than citizens or noncitizens with legal status.” James explained that “among lower courts, the [prevailing view] is that undocumented immigrants within the United States have the same Fourth Amendment protections as U.S. citizens.”
On Feb. 3, Speaker Johnson described his frustration with limitations on administrative warrants, specifically when someone runs into a private home. Johnson commented that “the controversy has erupt where if someone is … going to be apprehended and they run behind a closed door and lock the door. I mean, what is ICE supposed to do?”
The DHS press release echoed such concerns, arguing that “[b]ecause Congress hasn’t created a mechanism to obtain a judicial warrant, this meant that under previous presidential administrations, ICE would sit outside the homes of fugitive aliens waiting for them to come outside before arresting them.” DHS said, “Illegal aliens quickly identified this loophole” and would “openly taunt the ICE officers” waiting outside.
When asked about the situation Johnson described, Gihon said via email, “Prior to the current Trump term, immigration officers were trained not to enter private residences or private areas of public property without consent or an exception to the 4th amendment’s warrant requirement.”
We reached out to Johnson’s office for comment, but did not receive a response.
The May 2025 DHS memo said that “standard exceptions to the Fourth Amendment warrant requirement apply equally in the context of Form I-205 warrants,” including getting consent to go into a person’s home and “exigent circumstances,” such as “hot pursuit,” risks of evidence destruction or potential violence, attempts to flee, and “a substantial risk of harm to the persons involved or to the law enforcement process if the officer or agent must wait for a warrant.”
According to a 2021 Congressional Research Service report, the hot pursuit doctrine “provides that police may pursue a fleeing felony suspect into a home, when they have probable cause to make an arrest and when they set that arrest in motion in a public place.”
However, Gihon told us that the hot pursuit exception wouldn’t apply to arrests for civil immigration violations. “The U.S. Supreme Court has held that hot pursuit does not even extend to all criminal offenses,” he said, citing the 2021 Supreme Court case Lange v. California.
Referring to the DHS concerns about judicial warrants, James wrote that “DHS’s view that it lacks sufficient access to judicial warrants is not a valid basis for the agency to dispense with the requirements of the Fourth Amendment,” and that “constraints on ICE’s ability to obtain judicial warrants … may very well reflect Congress’s decided judgment that civil immigration violations should not be pursued by entering people’s homes.”
Finally, regarding the DHS position that ICE can use administrative warrants to enter a person’s residence when there is a final order of removal, Gihon told us that he was unaware of “any previous controlling interpretation of administrative or constitutional law” that would permit such entry.
Ultimately, the issue could be decided by the courts. James wrote that “the case law in this area is sparse,” citing three rulings by District Courts. “The paucity of case law is likely in part because DHS has historically conceded that administrative arrest warrants do not authorize ICE officers to enter people’s homes to arrest them. As a result, courts have rarely had occasion to comment on the issue.”
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