The Posse Comitatus workaround: ICE expands into domestic policing

Congress gave ICE $75 billion that it can’t take back. That is a constitutional problem.

Last month, armed ICE agents fanned out across 14 major airports — including Atlanta, New York’s JFK, Chicago’s O’Hare, Houston’ George Bush Intercontinental, Philadelphia, Phoenix and Newark — to handle general crowd control and security duties. TSA, the agency actually created, trained, and funded for that mission, was bleeding out. Hundreds of officers had quit. Thousands were calling out sick. The March 22 call-out rate hit 12 percent — the highest since the partial Department of Homeland Security shutdown kicked off in February.

ICE was created in 2003 by folding investigative and enforcement pieces of the old Immigration and Naturalization Service together with Customs functions under one roof at DHS. On paper, it made sense: Streamline, reduce duplication, get better coordination. In practice, over the last couple of years especially, the agency has morphed into something different. It has become a workaround to the limitations the federal government faces when it wants to use the military or traditional law enforcement for domestic policing inside the states.

American law has always tried to keep clear lanes for coercive power. The Posse Comitatus Act keeps the uniformed military out of routine civilian law enforcement. It reinforces a core protection of states against federal intrusion. ICE exercises real coercive power — arrests, detentions, armed operations — but it does so under civil administrative authority, carrying powers that criminal law enforcement agencies don’t get.

For most of its life, the Homeland Security Department’s policy respected basic Fourth Amendment limits. Administrative warrants (Form I-205s) are signed by agency supervisors, not judges. They were treated as insufficient for forced home entries.

Then, in May 2025, an internal ICE memo quietly reversed that........

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