Tensions rise nationwide over aggressive enforcement tactics and deadly encounters. As lawmakers convene for this year’s state legislative sessions, immigration has surged to the top of the agenda.

Cellphone video has emerged as a powerful rebuttal to Trump’s – and Trump officials’ — version of events, at a time when the federal government has restricted state and local investigators from accessing potential evidence to pursue their own investigations into excessive force and fatal shootings by immigration agents in their jurisdictions.

It is crucial to grasp that ICE and Border Patrol routinely violate the rights of US citizens, both the naturalized kind and those born right here. These assaults on citizens’ rights appear to be multiplying rapidly.Many advocates of constitutional liberty have begun pushing back against ICE and Border Patrol’s incursions on the Bill of Rights. More should join them.

ICE’s legal advisory – asserting that ICE agents may enter private homes with an administrative, rather than a judicial, warrant — rests on arguable, but exceedingly fragile, legal foundations. Administrative warrants, consent, and exigent circumstances can justify certain actions, but none supports a general authority to enter homes without a judicial warrant. The legal debate is not about immigration policy but about whether the executive branch can erode one of the Constitution’s most settled protections.

U.K. core challenge today is not simply the volume of arrivals, but the rapidly evolving criminal ecosystems that facilitate them. Smuggling networks are adjusting faster than governmental policy tools, by shifting routes, exploiting digital platforms, and experimenting with new forms of coercion and revenue generation. Unless the UK and its European partners update their approach in 2026, they risk merely managing arrivals rather than disrupting the criminal systems that drive them.

The killing in Minneapolis is but the latest in a series of incidents involving federal immigration agents’ use of apparent excessive force, in violation of the Fourth Amendment and federal criminal law. Samantha Trepel writes that DOJ has remained disturbingly silent through months of these tactics. “This silence is a dangerous abdication of DOJ’s authority and responsibility.” Unfortunately, DOJ’s current abdication of responsibility “puts communities at needless risk and undermines the rule of law itself.”

Debates over deadly force are often contentious, but for the most part there is consensus on one point: Policing should reflect a commitment to valuing human life and prioritizing its protection. One expression of that commitment is the prohibition on shooting at moving vehicles – but ICE’s policy on shooting at moving vehicles lacks a clear instruction for officers to get out of the way of moving vehicles where feasible. It’s an omission at odds with generally recognized best practices in policing.

Since Inauguration Day, more than 1.5 million immigrants have either lost or will lose their temporary legal status, including their work authorizations and deportation protections. It’s the most rapid loss in legal status for immigrants in recent United States history.

Immigration arrests under the Trump administration continued to increase, but rather than the convicted criminals the administration has said it’s focused on, an ever-larger share of those arrests were for solely immigration violations.