De-ICEing

January 29, 2026·1 hr 16 min·7 clips

ICE agents break into homes without warrants while Trump officials spread fantasies about victims like Alex Preddy.

The room starts cold. Plotz opens the January 29, 2026 de-icing edition from Washington, stuck inside his house, while Emily Bazelon joins from New Haven and John Dickerson checks in from icy, snowy New York. Even the weather banter carries a little argument. Dickerson's new podcast title, Naval Gazing, gets a quick spelling joke before the panel turns to ICE, Trump, the Twin Cities protest movement, and Alex Preddy's killing. The joke fades fast. The first question is whether the killing and the protests will chasten Trump or slow ICE, and the panel knows even the verb is awkward. Then the legal categories start to wobble. One argument asks whether undocumented people have home protections at all, or whether the government is only limited by the risk of sweeping up an American. That framing lands cold on purpose. The answer from the other side is that people without status may still have rights where they sleep, even if the Supreme Court has not settled this immigration-enforcement version cleanly. Nobody pretends the doctrine is neat. The panel treats the Trump administration's possible theory as a bid to push through an unsettled crack in Fourth Amendment law and make room for a much larger exception. Judges arrive late in the story. ICE moves first, then courts try to say where the agency went too far, which makes legal review feel more like cleanup than control. The numbers hit hard. A chief federal judge in Minneapolis is cited saying ICE had violated nearly 100 court orders and had disobeyed more judicial directives in January alone than some agencies had in their entire existence. The panel separates those violations from warrantless actions that happen before a judge can intervene. That distinction matters because it makes the problem bigger, not smaller. Under the mess is a blunt institutional claim: the administration moves fast, dares judges to keep up, and uses constitutional uncertainty as room to operate. The episode is less an immigration-law lesson than a tense argument about enforcement speed as a legal tactic.

As heard by us

A sharp Gabfest on ICE raids, judicial limits, and the constitutional strain behind the Twin Cities protests.

Political Gabfest turns the killing of Alex Preddy, the Twin Cities protests, and ICE raids into a broader argument about executive power and constitutional limits.

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You want the legal fight around ICE, Trump, and protest sharpened into plain English.

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