'Nothing but green lights': Leaked memo shows ICE expanding warrantless arrest powers

Federal immigration agents have quietly been granted sweeping new authority to arrest people without warrants, according to a leaked Immigration and Customs Enforcement memo reviewed by The New York Times.

The internal memo, issued this week amid escalating tensions over President Donald Trump’s aggressive immigration crackdown, significantly lowers the standard ICE agents must meet to justify a warrantless arrest. Rather than determining whether someone is unlikely to appear for future immigration hearings, agents are now instructed to consider whether a person might simply leave the scene.

“The change expands the ability of lower-level ICE agents to carry out sweeps rounding up people they encounter and suspect are undocumented immigrants, rather than targeted enforcement operations in which they set out, warrant in hand, to arrest a specific person,” the Times reported Friday.

The memo – signed Wednesday by Todd Lyons, ICE’s acting director, and circulated to all ICE personnel – cites a federal statute allowing warrantless arrests when a person is “likely to escape.” Lyons criticized ICE’s prior interpretation as “unreasoned” and “incorrect.”

“An 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,” Lyons wrote in the memo, according to the Times.

Former senior ICE officials warned that the change effectively guts the standard warrant requirement.

Claire Trickler-McNulty, a former senior adviser at ICE during the Biden administration, called the new definition “an extremely broad interpretation of the term ‘escape.’”

“It would cover essentially anyone they want to arrest without a warrant, making the general premise of ever getting a warrant pointless,” she told the publication.

Scott Shuchart, a former Biden-era ICE policy, said the memo “bends over backwards to say that ICE agents have nothing but green lights to make an arrest without even a supervisor’s approval.” But Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin insisted that the guidance “is not new.”

“This is simply a reminder to officers,” she wrote in a statement to the Times to keep “detailed records on their arrests.”