S2 Ep143: Secret ICE Memo Says They Can Enter Homes Without Warrants (w/ Elliot Williams)
The Illegal News with Sarah Longwell
The Bulwark
4.9 • 3.4K Ratings
🗓️ 28 January 2026
⏱️ 61 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
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Summary
Sarah Longwell is joined by former ICE attorney and CNN legal analyst Elliot Williams to discuss the growing clash between ICE, the Justice Department, and the courts. Williams explains why a federal judge in Minnesota is threatening contempt after ICE ignored a court order, and why DOJ’s response—appealing denied arrest warrants tied to a church protest—stunned the court. They talk about a secret DHS memo claiming ICE can enter private homes without judicial warrants, what that means for the Fourth Amendment, and why these tactics are triggering growing legal and public backlash.
Letters from Judge Schiltz calling out DOJ's abuse of the court system:
Secret DHS memo on warrantless entry by ICE: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/26499371-dhs-ice-memo-1-21-26/
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | If they had evidence to suggest that the guy, anybody is engaged in acts of domestic |
| 0:04.2 | to come forward with it and say it. |
| 0:06.3 | But that's a really big slur for lack of a better term to throw out there in the absence |
| 0:13.7 | of any evidence. |
| 0:14.6 | Hello, everyone, and welcome to the illegal news. |
| 0:17.6 | I'm Sarah Longwell, publisher of the bulwark, and I'm still not a lawyer. So I'm joined |
| 0:21.8 | today by Elliot Williams, who is a lawyer, to help us break down the illegal news. How you doing, |
| 0:28.9 | Elliot? I'm good. I'm a, I'm not just a lawyer. I play one on TV quite literally. So, |
| 0:34.7 | you know, we'll see how this goes. Yeah, you're a CNN legal analyst, |
| 0:38.3 | a former DOJ attorney and author of the book, Five Bullets, which was just released last week. Thanks. |
| 0:43.9 | That's great. That's, uh, congratulations. No, thank you so much. It's, it's an intense week, |
| 0:48.6 | uh, but so happy to be here to talk through all this illegalness, kind of legalness? |
| 0:54.5 | Sometimes books like yours, they just end up becoming newly relevant in ways you couldn't |
| 1:00.4 | even have anticipated. |
| 1:01.6 | Oh, yeah. |
| 1:02.5 | So I want to jump in with the contempt proceeding because there was an order issued by the federal |
| 1:10.5 | district court in Minnesota yesterday, January 26th, because we're taping on the 27th. |
| 1:16.1 | And it ordered Todd Lyons, who is the acting director of ICE, to appear in court on January 30th to explain why he shouldn't be held in contempt. |
| 1:26.1 | So the backstory is that on January 14th, the court ordered ICE to give a detainee a bond hearing |
| 1:31.6 | or release him from custody within seven days. |
| 1:34.4 | ICE didn't comply with the court order and the detainee remains in custody. |
| 1:39.1 | I guess what strikes me about this is like, how emboldened DOJ and ICE seem to feel these days to defy court orders? |
... |
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