Trump Ordered Using ‘All Lawful Means’ To Remove Immigrants. Many ICE Arrests Go Beyond the Law.

On his second inauguration day, in January 2025, President Donald Trump signaled one of his administration’s highest priorities by issuing an executive order titled “Protecting the American People Against Invasion.”

His declaration directed executive agencies to “employ all lawful means to ensure the faithful execution of the immigration laws of the United States against all inadmissible and removable aliens,” and to “ensur[e] the successful enforcement of final orders of removal.” Ironically, the Trump administration’s definition of “lawful means” has often crossed the border of legality.

Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act in July 2025, which appropriated over $170 billion for immigration enforcement over the next four years. Nearly $75 billion of that total went to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) alone—nearly tripling the agency’s budget from FY 2024. Trump’s mandate to ICE was clear: Increase arrests and detentions to reach 1 million deportations by the end of 2025, whatever the cost.

Even the cost of constitutional rights, evidently.

From January 20 through October 15, 2025, ICE made an estimated 217,518 arrests, compared to 149,070 arrests throughout all of 2024. The constitutionality of many of these arrests has been questioned as ICE protocols have pushed the limits of the Fourth Amendment.

Arrests stemming from stops motivated by racial profiling, although seemingly blessed by Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh last year in his concurrence in Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo, are believed by many legal experts to violate the Fourth Amendment right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures. Such stops are particularly troublesome given ICE’s proclivity to conduct unlawful warrantless arrests without first establishing probable cause as defined by federal law. That practice was so pervasive in Chicago that a federal judge ordered over 600 people to be released from immigration detention after finding ICE agents made warrantless arrests without probable cause.

ICE is even testing Fourth Amendment limitations when agents have an administrative arrest warrant in hand. An ICE memo leaked in January 2026 claimed certain administrative warrants (issued by officials within ICE itself) grant sweeping authority to use force to enter a home and circumvent the need for an actual court official’s approval. The guidance, allegedly taught to thousands of new ICE recruits, is the exact opposite of Fourth Amendment case law and ICE’s own training materials. Indeed, a federal judge in Minnesota recently ruled that a highly publicized forcible entry into an immigrant man’s home without a judicial warrant clearly violated the Fourth Amendment and ordered his release from custody.

Prior to Trump taking office, ICE held around 40,000 people in detention. As of mid-January 2026, ICE is imprisoning a record-breaking 73,000 individuals, most of whom have no criminal conviction. This includes over 1,300 children who, according to The Marshall Project, have been held in detention longer than 20 days, in violation of a legal agreement that provides protections for children in detention.

Overcrowded conditions at facilities resulted in at least 20 deaths, marking the agency’s deadliest year since 2004, when 32 deaths were recorded. Subsequently, many lawsuits have been filed alleging substandard medical care and inadequate food and water. And as ICE fails to provide humane conditions for detainees, it has also seemingly abandoned due process rights, and has been accused of denying attorneys access to clients housed inside facilities.

On the one-year anniversary of Trump’s executive order, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) claimed more than 675,000 immigrants had been removed from the country in 2025, compared to 271,484 in FY 2024. However, DHS’ improbably high number has been questioned by experts. Whatever the number, all deportations under the Trump administration are suspect given the due process violations immigrants face, from initial contact with ICE agents all the way to their right to a fair hearing in immigration court.

As Americans have spoken out against ICE’s unconstitutional tactics, agents have used increasingly excessive
force to silence citizens, violating First and Fourth Amendment rights. It’s no
wonder the popularity of Trump’s immigration policies has plummeted. In January alone, two U.S. citizens—
37-year-old Minneapolis mother Renée Good, and 37-year-old ICU nurse Alex Pretti—were killed while observing immigration enforcement operations, fueling national outrage and leading to a Reuters/Ipsos poll finding that 58 percent of respondents say ICE agents have gone “too far.”