Today, the Department of Homeland Security shared a video of non-lawyer Trump lackey Stephen Miller offering an alarmingly incorrect legal conclusion to all ICE agents on X (formerly Twitter). The tweet captioned the following text, a quote from Miller’s statement:

“REMINDER. To all ICE officers: You have federal immunity in the conduct of your duties. Anybody who lays a hand on you or tries to stop you or tries to obstruct you is committing a felony. You have immunity to perform your duties, and no one — no city official, no state official, no illegal alien, no leftist agitator or domestic insurrectionist — can prevent you from fulfilling your legal obligations and duties. The Department of Justice has made clear that if officials cross that line into obstruction, into criminal conspiracy against the United States or against ICE officers, then they will face justice.”

Miller originally made the statement several months ago in an October 24, 2025, interview with Fox News. His comments predate and foreshadow the events as they have unfolded so far in Minneapolis following the murder of Renee Good by ICE agent Jonathan Ross. More recently, J.D. Vance, who holds a law degree from Yale, asserted falsely that ICE agents have “absolute” immunity from prosecution. DHS used this erroneous legal argument advanced by Vance and Miller in the immediate wake of the Ms. Good’s murder as part of their messaging strategy. Their intended audience for this reprehensible misstatement of the law is both the public, who they openly threaten with these words, and the ICE agents in the field who will use these statements to justify their violence against communities across the nation – both a lightly-veiled threat and permission to use excessive and deadly force against people they don’t like.

When Miller or Vance use phrases like “federal immunity” or “absolute immunity” they are incorrectly referring to the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution, which does insulate federal workers, including ICE agents, from being sued or prosecuted for performing their jobs as federal workers by conferring immunity from suit only in state courts; and/or so-called “qualified immunity.” As any lawyer will tell you, “qualified” is the operative word over “immunity.” It means the immunity is not absolute, far from it.

Qualified immunity is a fairly recent judge-created rule that provides some protections for government officials, including ICE agents, when they are sued in civil court by a victim (or surviving family, if the victim dies). The courts have ruled that cops/agents/officials who violate someone’s constitutional rights can be held responsible only if there was a previous court decision that was similar enough to put the government agent on notice that what they were doing was illegal. This is, in part, why Miller is publicly stating that ICE agents should just go full militarized commando on the civilian population — so they can later argue that they believed and were told by their bosses that what they did was legal (that somehow they didn’t know that murdering innocent people without a legal justification was illegal). Add to it that ICE agents being hired without even a high school diploma, proper screening, training, onboarding, or supervision, and you have a recipe for a U.S. equivalent of Nazi “brownshirts” (“Sturmabteilung” in German — meaning assault division).

Qualified immunity has been used in many cases to protect bad cops/agents/officials who have engaged in all sorts of immoral, odious, illegal acts, including fatal shootings, police brutality, theft, extortion, sexual misconduct, and more.

But in fact, there are a variety of legal circumstances in which an ICE agent may be sued in civil court or criminally prosecuted and imprisoned – their federal status does not “absolutely” protect them from the fate of non-federal cops such as Derek Chauvin, who murdered George Floyd. And, as Hakeem Jefferies points out, the statute of limitations for many crimes committed by ICE (5 years to bring charges) well exceeds the next presidential election, leaving open the possibility of an administration with an actual concern for justice to meaningfully prosecute those responsible.

Of course, that isn’t a concern for the Vances and Millers of the world. They could not care less if some gun-crazy ICE agent is prosecuted and convicted of murder somewhere down the line. Once that minion has done the administration’s bidding and been held accountable for those actions, their usefulness to the regime is gone. The only people the administration cares about less than ICE agents under a future democratic president are our communities in the here and now.

The main reason “absolute immunity” has been asserted multiple times now is to scare people into submission — so they stop protesting, they stop standing up for their neighbors and communities, they stop exercising their First Amendment rights in the face of goons with guns. The reality is that ICE agents are absolutely being emboldened by these legal falsehoods coming from top positions, and care should be taken in the streets to respond to these changing dynamics.

Without hyperbole, the door-to-door home raids and brazen killings perpetrated by ICE represent a dark new frontier in our national story, but as we grapple with our circumstances we would also do well to remember our history. Whether against war or racial injustice, or towards a variety of forms of liberation, movements for peace, justice, and equality have always faced violence and repression from the state. Vance, Miller, and DHS aren’t just on the wrong side of the law when it comes to ICE immunity, they are on the wrong side of history.

Be safe. We’ve got your back.

Sources:

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2025/oct/29/stephen-miller/ICE-agent-immigration-raids-legal-immunity/
https://x.com/DHSgov/status/2011213308968538361
https://www.newsweek.com/jd-vance-minneapolis-ice-shooting-defense-immunity-minnesota-11331877
https://time.com/7344924/federal-officers-shooting-immigration-portland-minneapolis-prosecution-immunity/
https://www.naag.org/issues/civil-law/qualified-immunity/
https://x.com/RepJeffries/status/2011487705012531684?s=20
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/two-days-in-october-student-antiwar-protests-and-backlash/
https://eji.org/news/history-racial-injustice-violence-against-civil-rights-workers/
https://guides.loc.gov/lgbtq-studies/stonewall-era
https://www.rightsanddissent.org/the-cost-of-police-violence-and-mayhem/