Don’t open door for ICE agents, immigrants told
Lorena Melgarejo was awakened by her cell phone at 5 a.m. one day last fall. The caller was asking for help: U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers were at his front door, and he didn’t know what to do.
“You have the right to not open the door,” said Melgarejo, head of community group Faith in Action Bay Area, who got the call as part of her work for a hotline monitoring ICE activity in San Mateo County.
The man didn’t open the door, and the officers walked away — nothing came of it.
“Don’t open the door” is a message advocates are spreading across Northern California through Know Your Rights training sessions, in which they explain to immigrants that they have constitutional protections — one of which is that ICE officers need a
search warrant signed by a judge to enter a home without a resident’s permission.
Advocates want undocumented immigrants who fear increased arrests under the Trump administration to know that ICE deportation officers typically don’t secure judicial warrants when conducting sweeps, such as the one in Northern California last month that ended with 232 people being detained, or when attempting to make day-to-day arrests.
The trainings are set in the backdrop of California and its leaders battling the White House over the level of cooperation the state will provide to aid federal immigration enforcement. Although such training sessions are not new, the number that advocates have given in California has skyrocketed since the election of President Trump, who campaigned on a more restrictive immigration policy.
Organizations in the Bay Area report a 70 percent increase in the trainings since the 2016 election.
“Anecdotally, more people know they don’t have to open the door when ICE lacks a proper warrant,” said Luis Reyes Savalza, an attorney with Pangea Legal Services in San Francisco, who has led dozens of training sessions since Trump took office.
ICE officials say such efforts obstruct legitimate law enforcement activity.
“Organizations instructing aliens not to cooperate with ICE do so at the risk of undermining public safety and assisting convicted criminal aliens in evading law enforcement,” said Sarah Rodriguez, an agency spokeswoman.
Although ICE may not like it, the law on the matter is clear: Legal resident or not, no one is required to open the door for law enforcement without a warrant signed by a judge, said César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández, a University of Denver law professor.
“Neither does anyone have to allow any law enforcement agent to enter their home,” he said. “This is true of United States citizens and migrants, just as it is true of local police officers or ICE agents.”
Savalza said ICE officers rarely come to the door with search warrants, but often do have administrative immigration arrest warrants. Those warrants are signed by ICE officials — not by a judge — and do not require individuals to open their doors.
Advocates say that when immigrants open the doors to ICE officers, they risk the arrest not only of the person ICE is looking for, but of anyone else in the home as well. If officers are allowed into the home, any undocumented person inside is fair game for being taken into custody.
“It’s important that people exercise their rights,” Savalza said.
In the training sessions for immigrants, advocates explain these constitutional concepts by acting them out. Last week, the American Civil Liberties Union and the Immigrant Defense Project began a series of animated videos online detailing the rights of immigrants in their homes and in public.
In one video, narrated by “Grey’s Anatomy” star Jesse Williams, a middle-aged woman named Esther is cooking eggs when she hears banging on the door.
“It was 5:30 a.m. when ICE came to Esther’s apartment,” Williams says.
Esther looks out a peephole, and Williams notes that the ICE officers identified themselves as police looking for her husband. ICE has been known to use the tactic, which it is allowed to do.
“Esther’s gut told her she should cooperate,” Williams says, “but she remembered something she’d heard on the radio. ICE had been making early morning sweeps using
tricks like this to get people to open their doors. Esther remembered she had rights.”
In the video, Williams says, “Do not be fooled, and do not open the door.” Instead, he says, ask for a warrant signed by a judge.
If the officers lack such a warrant, Williams says, the resident can say, “I do not consent for you to enter my home. I do not want to talk to you without a lawyer present. Please leave.”
In the video, the officers do end up going away.
“This is all scary, but remember, we have rights,” Williams says.
Zachary Nightingale, an attorney at San Francisco immigration law firm Van Der Hout, Brigagliano and Nightingale, said any success that a targeted undocumented person has using this strategy is likely to be short-lived. He said ICE is efficient at tracking down those they want to find. Among other things, officers can simply wait until someone leaves home and make an arrest then.
“Not opening the door is probably a temporary measure,” Nightingale said. “If ICE wants to find you, they will find you.”
John Sandweg, who headed ICE under President Barack Obama in 2013, said that training sessions aside, communities are less likely to cooperate with immigration officers because of the Trump administration’s shift in priorities for deportation and heightened rhetoric.
“It creates a chilling effect in the communities,” he said. “It creates fear and a culture where people won’t open the door.”