Ben Shapiro on the Trump administration reportedly not requiring a judge-signed warrant to enter some homes: “To pretend that there is no legal basis whatsoever for what DHS and ICE are doing, that seems wrong”
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From the January 23, 2026, edition of The Daily Wire's The Ben Shapiro Show
BEN SHAPIRO (HOST): Now some of this is part and parcel of a new ICE policy that suggests that there does not need to be a judge-signed warrant in order to enter the home. Again, you heard that mentioned in the story from the New York Times that ICE agents are showing up at homes and based on administrative warrants, they are entering homes, and they are looking for illegal immigrants. According to The Wall Street Journal, the Trump administration is asserting new powers to forcibly enter the homes of people they are hoping to arrest without a criminal warrant signed by a judge. Over the summer, lawyers at ICE and its parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security, penned a secret memo expanding the authority by which agents may enter homes of immigrants with final deportation orders, the people said.
Now what's happening here? What they're saying is that is effectively a judge-signed warrant, or at least it's very similar. You have a deportation order. It has been signed by a judge, a final deportation order. And now they're using that as the predicate for the warrant. It is a civil warrant, not a criminal warrant. That is the basic argument that is being made. And when it comes to immigration enforcement, Supreme Court precedent suggests that administrative warrants issued by the attorney general rather than a judge could be utilized to arrest people pending deportation. And that was codified in the Immigration and Nationality Act, actually. Now there are restrictions on it. Like, you're not supposed to enter a private home without consent. But, again, the DHS has now said, well, maybe that changes because the final order of removal has already been signed. So the person's already had due process. It's not a matter of there has to be another judicial hearing in order to remove them. They already have a final order pending removal. And so once that order is already done, they've had their due process, and now it's just a question of executing the order. All of that will end up litigated in court, but to pretend that there is no legal basis whatsoever for what DHS and ICE are doing, that seems wrong.
According to The Wall Street Journal, DHS and ICE officials have not publicized or broadly distributed the legal decision because they felt it would invite legal scrutiny. Immigration lawyers and advocates from Minnesota have documented cases of agents breaking down people's doors to arrest them without a warrant. But again, in some of these cases, you're talking about people who have overstayed their visas by legitimately 20 years. The most prominent case concerned a Minnesota man born in Liberia whose Fourth Amendment right was violated by ICE officers when they broke down his door without his consent and without a judicial warrant. He was issued a deportation order in 2009. He was allowed to remain in the US under ICE supervision. His most recent check-in with ICE was December 29, 2025. And on January 11, immigration officers forced their way into his home and took him into custody. They said they had a warrant. Apparently, this would be the administrative warrant. This will all get litigated in court.