This judicial system is undergoing one of its most consequential stress tests in decades, as the

president pushes the limits of executive power and strains the nation's system of checks and balances.

Over the past year, the courts have moved to the center of the country's most significant

political fights, while the Trump administration has increasingly challenged the authority of

judges whose rulings have stalled

key parts of its agenda. As we mark a year into President Trump's second term, we're returning

this week to guests from our On Democracy series, which explores the laws, institutions, and norms

that have shaped this country and the different pressures they face today. We're joined now by Steve Vladick,

a constitutional law professor at Georgetown University. Welcome back to the program.

Thanks, Jeff. Thanks for having me. I want to start with immigration enforcement because it's

raising the most immediate constitutional questions. As you well know, there is this newly revealed

internal ICE memo that authorizes federal agents to forcibly enter homes with an administrative warrant instead of a warrant from a judge.

And the whistleblowers who presented this memo to Congress says, you know, this goes not just against their training, but also the law.

How do you assess the constitutional legitimacy of this policy?

Yeah, it's not legitimate. I mean, the whistleblower is right. So the Supreme Court, even as it has

poked holes in the Fourth Amendment over the last 35, 40 years, the one thing it has kept coming back to

is that an American's home is their castle. And so there are exigent circumstances in which law enforcement officers are allowed to enter a home without a warrant.

We just had a case about that a couple of weeks ago.

There are circumstances where a law enforcement officer might have probable cause to believe that there's a crime being underway in a home.

But this notion that an ICE officer can simply sign a piece of paper called an administrative warrant and use that as a basis for entering someone's home without any probable cause, without any exigency, without a federal judge signing off has no precedent in our jurisprudence and is frankly flatly inconsistent with everything the Supreme Court has said about the Fourth Amendment.

Our team reached out to DHS and received a statement, part of which reads this way.

The officers issuing these administrative warrants also have found probable cause.

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