Trump White House considering if federal agents can search homes without warrants under Alien Enemies Act
Lawyers for Donald Trump’s administration are considering whether his invocation of an 18th century wartime law allows federal law enforcement officers to enter homes without a warrant.
The president has deployed the Alien Enemies Act to rapidly deport, without due process, alleged members of Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua gang, designated a foreign terrorist organization. Officials, however, have admitted that many of the immigrants flown to a prison in El Salvador last weekend don’t have criminal records.
Trump is relying on the law for only the fourth time in U.S. history. It was most recently used to detain Japanese Americans, including U.S. citizens, during the Second World War.
“Terrorists don’t get to hide behind closed doors,” said an official with the Department of Justice in a statement to The Independent from the White House.
The administration is mulling whether federal agents can search for suspected gang members inside peoples’ homes without securing a warrant from a judge, The New York Times first reported, citing people familiar with the discussions.
It’s unclear whether the administration is providing law enforcement agencies with that guidance, which could amount to a drastic breach of the Fourth Amendment and constitutional protections against unreasonable searches and seizures.
Civil rights groups and legal experts are sounding the alarm, noting the president could be relying on the broad scope of the Alien Enemies Act to get around criminal and immigration law.
“The Fourth Amendment applies to everyone in the U.S., not just individuals with legal status,” Christopher A. Wellborn, president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, told the Times. “Taking away that right would be an “abuse of power that destroys our privacy, making Americans feel unsafe and vulnerable in the places where our children play and our loved ones sleep.”
That officials are considering the idea marks a “potential escalation in how Trump is going to use the Alien Enemies Act,” according to Katherine Yon Ebright, counsel in the liberty and national security program at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law.
“Thus far, it’s been used to deport Venezuelan immigrants. But the administration believes it can be used to search Venezuelan immigrants’ homes and arrest them, even without a warrant,” she said. “It is impossible to overstate how important it is for our judicial institutions, our Congress, and for every American to stand against this blatant attempt to re-run internment.”
In her 2024 report on the Alien Enemies Act, Yon Ebright noted that the law has been interpreted to “extend the president’s authority to not only detaining and deporting noncitizens but also controlling their speech, movements and livelihoods.”
The Second World War invocation of the act to justify the detention of Japanese Americans as “enemy aliens” provided sufficient legal grounds “for warrantless house raids in search of contraband,” Yon Ebright wrote.
One U.S. military document from the time included in her report declared an official only needed to determine a person’s status as an “alien enemy” to perform a search. “The question of probable cause will be met only by the statement that an alien enemy resides in such premises,” the document states.
Trump’s order states that “all Venezuelan citizens 14 years of age or older who are members of [Tren de Aragua], are within the United States, and are not actually naturalized or lawful permanent residents of the United States are liable to be apprehended, restrained, secured, and removed as Alien Enemies.”
