Protesters against federal ICE enforcement raids have First Amendment rights to photograph ICE agents, to criticize agents by name and to march and shout in protest against federal immigration enforcement.
But protesters can lose their constitutional protections if they interfere with law enforcement agents.
Seven federal appeals courts have confirmed that the First Amendment protects a person’s right to film and record police and federal agents in public spaces. Missouri’s 8th Circuit recently agreed, commenting that “every circuit court to have considered the question has held that a person has the right to observe police activity in public.”
This right includes protection for parents who see ICE agents at school and record videos to warn community members.
But here are some cautions about the line between constitutional protest and criminal activity:
- Don’t encroach on the officer’s space or block their path; comply with reasonable orders to back up.
- Never interfere with the officer; you lose 1A protection.
- Secure your recording device with a strong password and disable facial recognition. The Supreme Court has ruled that authorities must have a search warrant to search a cell phone, except in emergency situations. The protester can refuse to unlock a cell phone without a warrant. Nor can ICE agents take a cheek swab without permission or a warrant..
- Don’t post online private information about agents — no home addresses, family information or license plates of personal vehicles.
- Avoid engaging in conversations about harboring suspects or efforts to block law enforcement. That could be a criminal conspiracy; the kind of conspiracy charge prioritized by Trump prosecutors looking for Antifa conspiracies.
- Stick to the facts in public postings. Misinformation can sow confusion in a community.
- Don’t provide false information intended to mislead agents.
- Obey law enforcement orders that declare a demonstration an illegal assembly.
- Don’t throw rocks or bottles or break windows or trespass onto private property.
- Move out of the street if the police order you to do so to clear traffic.
Don’t follow agents home
Targeting agents is illegal. In Los Angeles, three women were indicted on felony charges for following an ICE agent from the Civic Center to his home on Aug. 28, 2025. They were accused of livestreaming the pursuit, giving viewers directions, posting the agent’s address on Instagram and shouting to neighbors that an ICE agent lived there.
This month, two of the three women were convicted after a week-long jury trial on one count of stalking but found not guilty of conspiring to publish protected personal information about a federal employee. The women convicted were Ashleigh Brown and Cynthia Raygoza. A third defendant, Sandra Samane, was acquitted of both charges.
The women said they believed they were following the vehicle to an immigration raid, but ended up at the home of the ICE agent. The three had been regular protesters against the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration enforcement in Southern California.
Under First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli, federal prosecutors in Los Angeles filed more than 100 cases charging protesters with assaulting and impeding the actions of immigration agents. They obtained guilty pleas in 23 of the cases but had lost every case that went to trial before the recent convictions of Brown and Reygoza, who face up to 5 years in prison.
Federal prosecutors can also charge protesters with conspiracy to harbor, but they have to prove specific intent. That requires them to show the protester “entered into an agreement” to violate immigration law and had the intent to coordinate hiding or transporting people to avoid their detention. Protesters posting location alerts should prioritize public safety over evading law enforcement efforts.
The bottom line is that protesters have important rights, but they are more likely to exercise them if they don’t flaunt in the face of law enforcement officials.
A person stopped by police may exercise their full rights. That person could rummage through their pants pockets for a cell phone; record video of the officer out the window; invoke the right to remain silent; tell their passengers they can leave; accuse the officer of racial profiling; demand the reason for the stop; and demand the officer’s name and badge number.
But many civil rights lawyers say an aggressive assertion of rights during a police stop is more likely to get the citizen in trouble than a more low-key assertion of rights aimed at collecting information for a formal civilian complaint after the encounter.
Administration wins conviction in first ‘Antifa’ case
The Trump administration recently won a victory in a Texas prosecution of anti-immigration protesters whom the government classified as “Antifa domestic terrorists.”
Eight of the nine were convicted of providing “material support” for terrorism for wearing black clothes to the late-night demonstration. Use of “black bloc” clothing is considered a terrorism tactic by federal law enforcement, and Trump has named Antifa a domestic terrorism group. Four of the protesters convicted of providing material support were acquitted of second-degree murder charges.
The Trump administration celebrated the verdicts.
“Antifa is a domestic terrorist organization that has been allowed to flourish in Democrat-led cities — not under President Trump,” said Attorney General Pam Bondi. “Today’s verdict on terrorism charges will not be the last as the Trump administration systematically dismantles Antifa and finally halts their violence on America’s streets.”
The case is the federal government’s first use of the “material support for terrorism” charges against alleged Antifa members. The outcome could give the Trump administration a roadmap for an aggressive stance against left-wing activity and further politicize the use of domestic terrorism laws.
“It probably will embolden them to perhaps offer additional characterization of entities or groups … animated by some sort of anti-administration agenda as some species of Antifa,” said Tom Brzozowski, former counsel for domestic terrorism at the Department of Justice.
The prosecutions grew out of a nighttime protest, July 4, 2025, outside ICE’s Prairieland Detention Facility that began with demonstrators shooting fireworks and spray-painting cars in the parking lot.
Government-obtained Signal messages showed that the demonstrators thought an earlier, less confrontational protest had been ineffective. Protesters were anxious to make a stronger showing. Some protesters brought guns, which is legal in Texas. A police officer responding was shot in the neck by one of the protesters, Benjamin Song, who had brought an AR-15 with a trigger modified for a higher rate of fire.
Song was convicted of one count of attempted murder for shooting the officer, but acquitted on two other counts of attempting to shoot at two correctional officers. He faces up to life in prison.
‘Go big and go loud’
In the days after the assassination of Charlie Kirk last September, Vice President JD Vance and other top administration officials blamed leftist groups, such as Antifa, for organizing violence.
Trump issued National Security Presidential Memo 7 that expanded the definition of domestic terrorism to include non-violent action such as revealing the personal details of agents or otherwise harassing agents or getting in their way.
The New York Times reported that in early January — just after the killings in Minneapolis — Associate Deputy Attorney General Aakash Singh urged federal prosecutors to “Go big and go loud” in their prosecution of protesters disrupting ICE operations.
The prosecutorial push has yet to develop evidence of a left-wing Antifa conspiracy. Even in the successful Prairieland, Texas, prosecution, the government’s cooperating witnesses denied that they had connections to Antifa.
Meanwhile, in mid-March, prosecutors in Chicago dropped all charges against two of the “Broadview Six”, Democratic officeholders and activists indicted last fall after protesting outside an ICE facility in the small suburb of Broadview, Ill. The six maintain the prosecutions were politically motivated.
The government accused the protesters of obstructing an immigration agent in his vehicle outside the facility.
But videos show the agent had turned the vehicle into a crowd of demonstrators. Charges remain against the four other protesters, but prosecutors have admitted there was no “advanced planning” or “preexisting agreement” among those in the group. The prosecutors instead claim there was a “spontaneous conspiracy” that began when the protest began. Defense lawyers have derided that theory as a stretch.
Last summer, the acting U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Washington, Richard R. Barker, resigned rather than bring a prosecution against nine protesters who were later charged with impeding federal agents driving to a court hearing in Tacoma.
As it turned out, the government offered a deal in which felony charges were dropped to misdemeanors if they stayed out of trouble for 18 months, and most of the defendants took it and pleaded guilty.
Barker told the New York Times, “I knew there was no place for me in the Justice Department if I was being asked to bring felony charges against these protesters….This was not an organized conspiracy. It was a protest where people were exercising their free-speech rights.”
Illinois responds to Operation Midway Blitz
Illinois has led the nation in responding to Trump’s immigration crackdown. In December, Gov. J.B. Pritzker signed a bill he said was a “nation-leading” response to Trump’s enforcement.
The law protects immigrants from arrest within 1,000 feet of a state courthouse and affords individuals the legal right to sue federal agents who violate their constitutional rights. Under current law, individuals can file civil rights lawsuits against police, but there is no federal law that permits these suits against federal agents. Democrats in Congress attempted to pass a federal right of action against federal agents in recent months but failed to do so.
The new Illinois law also generally prohibits public colleges and universities, hospitals and child care facilities from disclosing the immigration status of students, patients, parents and children.
The Justice Department has challenged the new law, arguing that it violates the U.S. Constitution’s Supremacy Clause, which provides that federal law and the Constitution are the supreme law of the land and take precedence over a contrary state law.
During Operation Midway Blitz, DHS arrested 4,500 immigrants who were living in the Chicago area without legal permission. The raids led to violent confrontations between masked federal agents and protesters, including near a processing facility in suburban Broadview. Tear gas and other chemical agents were used against protesters.
Leading Democrats called the new law a comprehensive legislative response to the blitz, but its reach was limited. It did not, for example, include a ban on law enforcement officers wearing face masks on duty.
Another significant step the governor took was to challenge Trump’s deployment of the National Guard to Chicago. On Dec. 23, in one of its more significant responses to Trump’s actions, the U.S. Supreme Court issued an opinion stating that Trump had no power to deploy the guard under current circumstances.
Missouri and southern states make deals
Meanwhile, Missouri is moving in the opposite direction. Brian Munoz of St. Louis Public Radio reported that more and more Missouri municipalities are signing so-called 287(g) agreements with the federal government, under which state and local police augment immigration enforcement. Munoz found that the number of these 287(g) agreements in Missouri doubled in the first months of 2026 — from the 30s to 60s — with a big jump in north St. Louis County.
Austin Kocher, a Syracuse University researcher, told Munoz that this “means that those local police officers, deputies, state highway patrol officers, can go out into the field and ask about immigration status and ask immigration questions while they are out doing routine enforcement traffic stops, responding to 911 calls.
“Sheriffs are elected by popular vote,” he added, “so they may be motivated, especially during an election year, to run on a pro-immigration enforcement policy if they feel like that is something that will give them an edge over their competition.” The “massive blank check” Congress gave DHS last year makes these agreements lucrative, he said.
Altogether, the heightened immigration enforcement has led to a big jump in the number of citizens detained, from 40,000 to 70,000 — the biggest number of detentions since the detention centers for Japanese-Americans during World War II. The federal government is searching the country for warehouses it can use as make-shift detention facilities for large numbers of detainees. Many local communities have begun to oppose those efforts. NPR reported that more people have died in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody since October — 23 — than have died in the whole prior fiscal year.
Uncertainty about administrative warrants
One important issue that remains unresolved is whether police can use an “administrative warrant” to enter someone’s home. Administrative warrants are issued by an agency itself, in this case ICE. They do not go before a neutral magistrate as judicial search warrants do.
Video from Minneapolis showed masked agents showing up at homes with administrative warrants and demanding entry.
Most legal experts agree that an administrative warrant is sufficient to arrest an undocumented immigrant if they are encountered on the street, but not in the home.
In May 2025, DHS issued a policy revision, ordering agents to use administrative warrants instead of judicial ones for house searches. The revision said it was to comply with the president’s “Executive Order 14159, Protecting the American People Against Invasion.”
The whistleblower who brought attention to the revised policy said that instructors at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center are directed to verbally train all new ICE Agents to follow this policy and disregard written course material instructing the opposite.
The report following up on the whistleblower complaint concluded the new policy would “neuter the warrant requirement of the Fourth Amendment, overturning decades of strong constitutional legal precedent.”
The DHS’s legal reasoning for changing policy was brief. “Although the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has not historically relied on administrative warrants alone to arrest aliens subject to final orders of removal in their place of residence, the DHS
Office of General Counsel has recently determined that the U.S. Constitution, the immigration and Nationality Act, and the immigration regulations do not prohibit relying on administrative warrants for this purpose.”
Orin Kerr, a legal expert who writes for Lawfare, wrote, “The standard view has been that administrative warrants can’t authorize home entry because they’re executive branch orders, and the executive branch can’t be in charge of deciding whether to give itself a warrant.”
A California federal district court recently concluded that ICE administrative warrants do not authorize ICE officers to enter homes to conduct an arrest. In January, the Minnesota federal district court also held that a home entry, which appears to have been carried out under DHS’s new policy, violated the Fourth Amendment. In 2021, a Texas federal judge concluded that court decisions permitting the use of administrative warrants on the street “indicated” they could be used to enter homes.
The roots of the 4th Amendment’s warrant requirement run deep in the founding of the country. In 1761, James Otis Jr., a young lawyer, resigned as Massachusetts Advocate General to represent merchants challenging the British use of overly broad general warrants. He lost his case but John Adams later wrote that Otis’ argument was the moment when “the Child Independence was born.”
William H. Freivogel is the publisher of GJR, a former editorial page deputy editor for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and contributes to St. Louis Public Radio. He is a member of the Missouri Bar.
