Amicus With Dahlia Lithwick | Law, justice, and the courts · Slate Podcasts

Who Gave ICE Permission to Trample the Constitution?

January 24, 2026·50 min·5 clips

Alex Reiner reveals that qualified immunity only applies when officers already violate your constitutional rights.

Amicus With Dahlia Lithwick is Slate's podcast covering law, courts, and justice. This episode opens with audio of administration officials asserting that ICE officers have absolute federal immunity when conducting federal law enforcement duties, and warning that no state or city official, no undocumented person, and no protester can interfere with those duties. Lithwick frames this against several high-profile incidents: a five-year-old child photographed in distress during an enforcement action, an older man in Crocs handcuffed in cold weather, and an internal ICE memo advising agents they do not need a judicial warrant to enter private homes. Lithwick notes that an ICE officer named Jonathan Ross shot and killed a woman named Renee Nicole Good on January 7th in Minneapolis — making her one of at least 25 people shot and killed by immigration enforcement. The week before, the show examined the DOJ's decision to investigate local Minnesota officials while refusing to investigate the shooting officer. This week, Lithwick turns to the structural legal question: where does this immunity doctrine come from, and how did the constitutional framework for federal officials end up being harder to enforce than the one for state officials? Alex Reiner traces qualified immunity's origins and the long series of judicial decisions that have expanded it. He argues that the current situation reflects longstanding American assumptions about who is a good guy and who is a bad guy in law enforcement interactions, and that these assumptions are now producing outcomes that make the federal constitution functionally weaker against federal actors than against state actors — an inversion of what most people would expect. The episode does not reach a resolution but maps the legal terrain clearly for a general audience.

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