Legal Experts Detail Fourth Amendment Limits on ICE Encounters Amid Minneapolis Surge

A PolitiFact/PBS explainer uses the Minneapolis ICE surge and viral confrontation videos to spell out what constitutional protections apply when Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers stop, question or detain people in the U.S. Legal scholars emphasize that everyone—regardless of immigration status—is protected by the Fourth Amendment’s bar on unreasonable searches and seizures, and that brief detentions require 'reasonable suspicion' while arrests require 'probable cause' tied to specific facts, not mere guesses or accents. The article highlights a 2025 Supreme Court order in Noem v. Perdomo, in which Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote that 'apparent ethnicity' can be a 'relevant factor' in reasonable‑suspicion analysis if combined with other indicators, a shift that critics fear will effectively green‑light more racial profiling by ICE. It contrasts ICE’s broad statutory powers with the higher constitutional bar for entering homes or conducting prolonged street stops, and notes growing public confusion as thousands of agents fan out in Minneapolis neighborhoods, sometimes in ways that appear to outstrip those legal limits. Civil‑rights attorneys quoted in the piece urge residents to understand their rights to remain silent, to ask if they are free to leave, and to refuse consent to enter homes without a judicial warrant, even as the Supreme Court’s trajectory makes aggressive immigration enforcement harder to challenge.