Whistleblower Blows the Roof Off Trump’s Secret ICE Scheme

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3:00Michael Popok:Sometimes self-serving memos created by the Trump administration see the light of day when groups like Whistleblower Aid come to the rescue, supported by two government insiders still working for the government who have blown the whistle on Donald Trump and ICE and the Department of Homeland Security, in which they have now told, according to this secret memo, I'll talk about now and post on Legal AF Substack for you. They have now told all ICE agents that you do not need to go to an independent magistrate or federal judge that sits in the judicial branch. No, based on a memo written by a Trump lawyer and an arrest warrant by an immigration judge who works for Donald Trump, you can take that piece of paper and go burst down a door and take out anybody inside that you find subject to that administrative arrest warrant.

3:54Michael Popok:Totally turns upside down and violates the Fourth Amendment against unreasonable search and seizure. Turns upside down all Supreme Court precedent that I'm aware of concerning unreasonable searches and seizure, which always requires that to go through the curtilage of somebody's home where it is your castle, even if you are an undocumented migrant who lives in that home, you must have a federal judge oversight, real arrest, arrest warrant. That's what you need, not a piece of paper generated by a administrative law judge in immigration world who, despite the title judge, does not work for the judicial branch, but works for the Trump administration and Department of Justice.

4:40Michael Popok:So let me get this straight, everybody here on Midas Touch. You can just have a Trump Trump lawyer writing for the Department of Homeland Security issue a memo that then is used by another Trump official in ICE that says that you can use a Trump issued warrant. Again, no oversight, as you've noticed here, from a federal judge sitting on the judicial side to go through a person's home and take them out. This against the backdrop of reporting that in Minnesota, they're going after a certain school district and used a five-year-old as bait. Armed, masked ICE agents took a five-year-old, we have a photo, and used him to knock on a door to get people out.

5:26Michael Popok:And then as reward for the five-year-old being used as bait, took the five-year-old and his father and sent him to San Antonio, Texas to go be surrounded in a detention center with barbed wire and cages. This is the America, everybody, under Donald Trump, you know. And we have the new memo I'm going to read to you about. We've got that. And then we've got that administrative law judge who works for Donald Trump, the chief judge of the immigration world, Teresa Riley, telling her other Trump judges they don't have to follow federal judges and their orders about due process and bond hearings and habeas corpus rights.

6:06Michael Popok:I'm going to pull all this last 24 hours together here, starting with the whistleblowers here on the Midas Touch Network. Well, it's not secret anymore. We got our hands on it because the Washington Post got it, because the Associated Press got it, because members of Congress got it. And now we're going to have to enter the world of immigration. And I'll do a teachable moment here about it. There are two types of arrest warrants, and they are different. And they're differently analyzed under our Fourth Amendment principles. There is a Form I-205 immigration administrative warrant, and there is one that's issued by a federal judge or magistrate judge who is neutral and detached and bases decisions based on those facts and challenges the Department of Justice, right?

6:53Michael Popok:Right. Adversarial process doesn't accept everything they have to say doesn't rubber stamp. By contrast, an I-205 administrative arrest warrant is issued by an immigration judge who, despite their title, works for the executive branch, is under Department of Justice and works ultimately for Donald Trump. So, of course, they are the ultimate rubber stamper. And the procedures in immigration in immigration world are very limited. You lose on a notice that you're going to be removed, final order of removal. You got very little appellate rights in that process. Now, historically, I-205 arrest warrants are only used in public places.

7:36Michael Popok:You're out on the street. You're out in front of your home. You're out at a school. You're out in a courthouse, you know, going to court for something or a church, I guess, or a school. There, you can use the administrative warrant. If you're going to go through what we call, you know, the home is somebody's castle, right? You're going to go through the castle, the castle keep, the curtilage. You're going to break the plane. You're going to break down the door. Supreme Court says you need more. Supreme Court has always said, look at U.S. versus Payton, a case from 1980. It says you need to have an independent, dispassionate judge in the judicial branch making these decisions.

8:20Michael Popok:until May of 2025, when for the first time in U.S. history, a Department of Homeland Security general counsel attorney wrote a memo that said, you don't need to only execute an I-205 administrative warrant from a Trump judge in public. You can go break down a door with it. In particular, this is what the memo says. Although the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has not historically relied on administrative warrants to arrest aliens subject to final orders in their place of residence, their home, 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 the use from this purpose.

9:11Michael Popok:I would beg to differ. I think they should go look at Supreme Court precedent. And then they gave the guidance about how they need to enter the home. They can conduct an administrative arrest with a knock and announce, even though it says that a form I-205 is not a search warrant and should only be used to enter the residence of the subject alien to conduct an administrative immigration arrest. Once inside, they may then conduct a limited search of the immediate area. So you can knock down your door with a Trump judge piece of paper in your back pocket and take out whoever's there and do a search while they're at it.

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11:18Michael Popok:And they have supplied this memo to members of Congress and to the press. and now we're covering it as we criticize and as a prerequisite, I'm sure, to a lawsuit that will soon be filed about this memo. This is what it says.

11:45Michael Popok:Just to show you the example between the in-public administrative warrant and the federal judge warrant, Hannah Dugan, who's a state court judge in Milwaukee, well, she was, and got arrested, indicted, and convicted. She interfered, according to that conviction, with the execution of an administrative I-205 warrant in a public place. Okay, now I understand it. So what's going to happen now that this has come out? Now that this memo, which is posted on Substack for Legal AF, is out there? There's now going to be challenges. I don't know if it's the American Civil Liberties Union. I don't know if it's Democracy Forward.

12:24Michael Popok:It's going to be a group that steps forward and has standing to challenge this policy as being unconstitutional under our Fourth Amendment and Fourth Amendment precedent. Against that backdrop, we've got new reporting that a five-year-old, and not the only five-year-old, was arrested, detained, and sent to a detention center, but first used as bait to try to get other people to come out of the house that were his family. If you're appalled by that, that's not the only thing that's going on in Minnesota. We've had 10-year-olds be arrested. We've got five-year-olds be arrested, 17-year-olds who are all coming back from school.

13:02Michael Popok:The story of the five-year-old, Liam Conejo Ramos, his father, as he was coming into the driveway, coming back from school pickup, was met by a gang of masked armed ICE agents. Father took off. I mean, the kid was in front of his own house, so I think the father panicked at that moment. And then they grabbed the five-year-old, pushed him up to the front door, trying to get him to bang on the door to get the family to come out so they could arrest them too. Now, there was nobody in there that had a problem, apparently, and they begged to have the five-year-old stay with the family. No, they sent him to San Antonio with his father in a cage.

13:40Michael Popok:In a cage. Shout out to the Columbia Heights School District. We stand with you and all that is going on for you. And then finally, to round out this madness of the last 24 hours, the chief immigration judge, remember I just said immigration judges are not really judges because they're not appointed to the judicial branch under the Constitution. They work for the Trump administration. They work for the presidency of the Department of Justice. The head lawyer there, head judge there, Teresa Riley, she entered a memo. She issued a memo to her colleagues that told them to ignore two federal court orders that required bond hearings and due process for people who are in detention.

14:19Michael Popok:No, you don't need to. You can ignore those. They're not binding, which led the American Civil Liberties Union to run back into court where they are now in the case involving Judge Saras in Massachusetts and file a new document to ask for a status conference because of this issue. Judge Saras said she's very troubled that an administrative law judge is telling her colleagues in the immigration world to ignore federal court orders. So I'm sure she's going to make a ruling. We got another judge out in California, Judge Sykes, who made a ruling like that. This is all heading to the United States Supreme Court.

14:57Michael Popok:Let me just end this hot take this way. This is litigation exposure segment of the hot take. This will lead to a lawsuit, both of these things, all of these things, led by public interest groups, law firms that have the balls to represent these people, to get these Fourth Amendment rights issues before the United States Supreme Court as quickly as possible. And they've always been supporters of the Fourth Amendment, especially in the home. Uh, among the 10 amendments of the, of the, uh, constitution, first 10 amendments being the Bill of Rights, Supreme Court has often said that the fourth amendment is the most important of the amendments.

15:38Michael Popok:I think the first amendment is, but certainly the fourth amendment is right up there in the top two. So we're going to see what's going to happen next. I see lawsuit off this memo, challenging this policy, calling it and having a judge stop it and declare that it's wrong. That'll be my next report on this issue. Lawsuits over the five-year-olds being arrested and sent off to detention centers without due process and continued oversight by federal judges and a battle between the immigration judges led by the chief judge that works for Donald Trump and real judges that are Article III judges and magistrates that work in the judicial branch.

16:15Michael Popok:you know and if john roberts thought who presides over the entirety of the federal judiciary if he thought his branch is not under attack by the trump administration because he sits on high as a supreme court justice he's wrong i'll continue to follow it all right here on the mightest touch network come over to legal af youtube channel hit the free subscribe button and if you go to legal af sub stack you'll read the secret memo for yourself till my next report I'm Michael Popak.

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