He described doors opened without warning, desks emptied without explanation, families made to stand aside while strangers read their letters. He called the writs “the worst instrument of arbitrary power” in English law, and John Adams later wrote that this argument was the moment the American Revolution truly began.²
The British had soldiers in Boston, but it was the searches that made people feel conquered.
A house, Otis said, is a man’s castle. A government that can enter it at will does not simply enforce law. It teaches people where they stand.
When the Fourth Amendment was written years later, it did not read like political philosophy. It read like damage control.
“The right of the people to be secure … against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated,” the founders wrote, and then they added the machinery: probable cause, oath or affirmation, particular description.³ They were not designing elegance. They were trying to prevent a memory.
One line in the Declaration points back to this earlier fear: the king had “sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.”⁴ Those officers were not symbolic. They were men with keys to other people’s doors.
Now carry that memory forward.
In Minneapolis this winter, federal immigration agents broke down the front door of a home with guns drawn, forced a man outside in the snow in his underwear and sandals, and then discovered they had the wrong person. Reuters reported the raid as part of a court fight over limits a lower judge had placed on immigration agents’ use of force and arrests in the city.⁵
A few days later, the city was confronting something worse. On January 7, Renée Nicole Good, a thirty-seven-year-old U.S. citizen, was shot and killed by an ICE officer during an operation. The Washington Post later reported details from an independent autopsy commissioned by her family and described the conflict between federal officials and Minnesota authorities over how the killing would be investigated.⁶ The New Yorker described Minneapolis as the center of one of the largest ICE operations in decades, and it described a city adjusting to the presence of federal force the way occupied cities always do: carrying documents, watching corners, staying home.⁷
Then came the line that would have sounded familiar to anyone who has ever lived under a government arguing itself above the law. Vice President JD Vance defended the officer involved by claiming he was protected by “absolute immunity” from state prosecution. A fact-check by Gigafact made the point bluntly: federal officers do not enjoy absolute immunity from state criminal law.⁸ Even setting doctrine aside, the political message was unmistakable. Do what you must. We will argue later about jurisdiction.
Around the same time, a newly disclosed internal ICE memo became public. The Los Angeles Times reported that the memo authorized agents, in certain circumstances, to enter homes without a judge-signed warrant, relying instead on administrative authority. The article described a Minneapolis arrest in which a battering ram was used to break down a door.⁹ Senator Richard Blumenthal wrote to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem demanding documents and warning that the policy appeared to violate the Fourth Amendment.¹⁰
This is the moment where constitutional theory stops being abstract.