‘Nothing But Green Lights’: ICE Memo Expands Agents’ Warrantless Arrest Powers

An internal memo sent to all Immigration and Customs Enforcement personnel Wednesday declared the agency has the power to arrest suspected illegal immigrants, including those “likely to escape” in the time required to obtain a warrant.

The memo, sent by acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Director Todd Lyons and first reported Friday by The New York Times, states the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 “unequivocally authorizes an immigration officer to execute a warrantless arrest” of an “alien” that meets one of two criteria. Lyons’s memo outlines that immigrants subject to warrantless arrests include those whom an officer has determined are “entering or attempting to enter the United States in violation of any law … regulating the admission, exclusion , expulsion, or removal of alien” or who are both in violation of such laws and are “likely to escape before a warrant can be obtained.”

“[A]n alien is ‘likely to escape’ if an immigration officer determines he or she is unlikely to be located at the scene of the encounter or another clearly identifiable location once an administrative warrant is obtained,” the memo defines.

“Immigration officers are expected to ensure they obtain administrative warrants in advance of targeted enforcement operations. If warrantless arrests become necessary under the circumstances, immigration officers must effectuate such arrests in a manner consistent with the ICE policy and the law,” the memo concludes. “Immigration officers must therefore conduct an analysis of an alien’s likelihood of escape prior to effectuating a civil warrantless arrest and, as soon as practicable after the arrest, immigration officers must properly document all the likelihood of escape factors on Form I-213.”

“This nothing new. This is just a reminder to officers to be keep detailed records on their arrests,” Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Tricia McLaughlin told the Daily Caller News Foundation in a statement. ICE is an agency of DHS.

“Authority under USC 1357 and of course reasonable suspicion are protected by the U.S. Constitution. Law enforcement uses ‘reasonable suspicion’ to make arrests, as allowed under the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The Supreme Court has already vindicated us on this position,” McLaughlin added.

“The Immigration and Nationality Act authorizes immigration officers to ‘interrogate any alien or person believed to be an alien as to his right to be or to remain in the United States,’” Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in a September 2025 concurring opinion in Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo, in which the Court sided with the Trump administration, 6–3.

“Immigration officers ‘may briefly detain’ an individual ‘for questioning’ if they have ‘a reasonable suspicion, based on specific articulable facts, that the person being questioned … is an alien illegally in the United States,’” Kavanaugh continued.

Scott Shuchart, who served in a senior role at ICE during former President Joe Biden’s administration, told The New York Times that Lyons’s Wednesday memo “bends over backwards to say that ICE agents have nothing but green lights to make an arrest without even a supervisor’s approval.”

Under the memo, “even that supervisor’s note can almost always be sidestepped so long as the officer can say anything remotely plausible about the person being arrested possibly leaving the area,” the Biden-era ICE official told the outlet.

The memo “would cover essentially anyone they want to arrest without a warrant, making the general premise of ever getting a warrant pointless,” Claire Trickler-McNulty, another former ICE official during the Biden era, told the outlet.

Anti-ICE protests, many of them violent, intensified throughout the country in January 2025, following the fatal shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by ICE and Border Patrol officers, respectively.