Q&A: What immigrants should know about their Constitutional rights during an ICE visit

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Anxiety has reigned at some schools, churches and hospitals after moves by the Trump administration rolled back protections that had previously shielded them from visits from U.S Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers.

The moves have sparked conversations, including some worry and public pushback, in the South.

Nora Ahmed is legal director for the ACLU of Louisiana. Their group has been working to educate people from immigrant communities about their rights during a confusing time.

Ahmed said those rights are afforded to everyone by the Constitution, or “the founding principles of this nation that provide in broad brushstrokes what it means to be on United States land.”

She spoke to the Gulf States Newsroom’s Kat Stromquist to explain more about what that entails.

The following conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity. 

Thanks for joining me today. 

Thanks so much for having me, Kat.

There’s a lot of focus on immigration issues right now, and there’s also been a lot of news coverage about immigration raids. Is there any misinformation in those news reports that you’re seeing that you’d want to correct?

I don’t know if I’d say I want to change misinformation in news reports, but I do think that there is a widespread concern or refrain that seems to suggest that ICE now can enter schools, churches and hospitals without any restraints. And I would say that’s not correct.

Typically when we’re talking about schools, hospitals, churches, they are private areas, and this also applies to workplaces, where there’s restricted entry. And so ICE may not just go into restricted spaces without a judicial warrant.

So, it’s very important for people to understand the difference between an ICE or administrative warrant and a judicial warrant. An ICE or administrative warrant does not allow ICE to just enter a school, a church, a hospital, and go anywhere that they would like in order to identify and talk to anyone they want.

And it’s also important to understand that workplaces, churches, hospitals, and schools have mechanisms to ensure that everyone is prepared, should ICE show up at their doors and seek entry. Because the answer does not necessarily need to be yes, and is frequently contingent upon the paper that ICE brings with them. 

Just thinking about this, like, how this plays out in the real world — say that ICE comes to your workplace or school and starts asking questions about your immigration status. What are your rights in that moment? 

Well, I think it’s important to first ask how ICE gets into the school, the workplace, the hospital, to in fact access an individual to whom they can ask those questions. And that gets back to what I was saying earlier, that ICE does not have a per se right to enter all areas of a workplace or a school without the proper documentation.

Now, if they are subject to an ICE official coming up to them and there is concern about what is in fact happening, if questions are asked of you, you can ask if you have the right to leave. Because if ICE is there for a particular reason, it does not necessarily mean that they are there for you. And if you are told yes, then you can remove yourself from that situation.

Equally, if you are interrogated, you do not have to respond to the questions ICE might be asking you about your immigration status. You can say that you are exercising your right to remain silent.

Is there anything different to know about this if immigration officers are visiting your house and asking questions? 

So your house, you have some additional protections to a certain extent, in the sense that frequently you might have a knock on the door. And while many of us want to open the door, that is not necessarily advised. While you might open a door to an immigration official, and while legally that doesn’t give them the right to then enter just because you’ve opened the door, there’s often confusion when a door opens.

So what is frequently advised in this situation is that you can stay behind the door. But for any entry to take place, it’s necessary again for there to be a judicial warrant. And so it’s important to ask if the ICE officials on the outside of the door have a judicial warrant. And if they say that they do, it would be important to ask them to either show that, or for them to slip it under the door.

It’s important that that document include your name or the name of someone in the household, include that address that you are currently at, and for the signature to include an actual judicial signature. If this is an ICE warrant or an administrative warrant, it is not a judicial warrant, and therefore it does not immediately provide for access into the home.

Now, if an immigration officer enters without a valid warrant — let’s say by force — you want to make sure that you assert that you are not consenting to the search and you want to assert that you are going to remain silent. To the extent that it is possible, be it at a school or at home, let’s say there is some form of entry that takes place, documenting what is happening would be key. Because there will often likely be potential concerns about —and I said this before, a Fourth Amendment violation, right?

It’s sounding like it’s a challenging moment for a lot of folks. Are there any preemptive steps that people from immigrant communities should be taking to try and protect themselves? 

I think the sad answer to that is yes, right?

If you have immigration status and you have what we call an A number — that stands for an alien registration number — it’s important to have that memorized. There are going to need to be critical people in your life that need to know your A number because there is a way to actually check on where people might be located in our vast immigration detention system across the entire country.

Getting to another point, for children to have a plan in place if their parents are taken to immigration detention so that they are not almost immediately taken into the US foster care system. So families need to start thinking about what will happen if the most awful thing in the world takes place where we’re starting to talk about family separation again.

If you have been in the United States for more than two years, you will want to have and carry with you proof of that fact, be it utility bills, be it other types of documentation that show that you have been in the country beyond that two -year point. Because there is a very, very large concern that individuals who have [not] been here for more than two years will be considered to have not been here for that long and will be placed in an expedited removal and deportation process, which is rife with its own Constitutional issues and problems.

So the unfortunate answer is there might be a lot that families need to be doing right now to prepare.

And part of that is also ensuring that the schools don’t have access to their immigration status or their children’s immigration status. Children have the right to an education no matter what their immigration status is. That is the law of this land.

Lots to think about. Thanks for sharing that information with us. 

Absolutely.

This story was produced by the Gulf States Newsroom, a collaboration between Mississippi Public Broadcasting, WBHM in Alabama, WWNO and WRKF in Louisiana and NPR.