Do ICE agents have absolute immunity? Absolutely Not

Absolute immunity is a legal doctrine protecting certain high-level government officials -- judges, prosecutors, and legislators -- from lawsuits for actions taken within their official duties, shielding them from liability even for malicious or unconstitutional acts to ensure they can make difficult decisions freely. It's a near-total shield, contrasting with qualified immunity, which applies to state actors like police officers.

“The idea that a federal agent has absolute immunity for crimes they commit on the job is absolutely ridiculous,” Michael J.Z. Mannheimer, a constitutional law expert at Northern Kentucky University’s Salmon P. Chase College of Law, told CNN.

Mannheimer said that more than 120 years of case law on the issue of so-called supremacy clause immunity has shown that federal officials can be criminally pursued by state prosecutors for conduct taken in the course of their official duties but that it’s up to courts to ultimately determine whether they can be shielded from the charges.

“Officers are not entitled to absolute immunity as a matter of law,” said Timothy Sini, a former federal prosecutor in New York.

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PLW: Pa. Supreme Court Tackles Internet Privacy in 'Kurtz'

Matthew T. Mangino
The Legal Intelligencer
January 15, 2026

In summer 2016, a woman in Northumberland County went to bed after her husband, a corrections officer, left to work the midnight shift at Coal Township State Correctional Institution.

After he left an intruder entered the home. The intruder bound and gagged the woman, removed her from her home, and raped her in a nearby trailer. The Pennsylvania state police (PSP) investigated the crime.

Although foreign DNA was found on the victim’s body, the PSP could not match the DNA to any known person. Investigators surmised, through their preliminary investigation, that the perpetrator was familiar with the victim. The PSP obtained a “reverse keyword search warrant” requiring Google to provide any search of the victim’s name or address by anyone in the world for a week prior to the attack.

The warrant was not directed at a specific person’s activity, but instead any activity that was directed toward information about the victim. After about a year, Google found that two searches for the victim’s address occurred only hours before the attack.

The information provided by Google included the person’s IP address. As aresult, the PSP focused on John Edward Kurtz who was a corrections officer at the same facility as the victim’s husband. After grabbing a cigarette butt discarded by Kurtz and retrieving his DNA, the PSP found it matched the DNA retrieved from the victim.

Kurtz was arrested and subsequently filed a motion to suppress the Google warrant. Kurtz argued that the PSP failed to establish probable cause individualized to him, as constitutionally required to support the issuance of a search warrant.

However, before Kurtz could challenge the validity of the search warrant, he first had to demonstrate a reasonable expectation of privacy in the area searched. What is a reasonable expectation of privacy triggering the protection of the Fourth Amendment?

In Katz v. United States, 389 US 347 (1967), the U.S. Supreme Court found that a bookie using a telephone booth to place bets was protected by the Fourth Amendment and if police wanted to listen to his end of the conversation outside a telephone booth, they needed to get a search warrant.
The majority opinion was not as newsworthy as the concurring opinion by Justice John Marshall Harlan. As the Pennsylvania Supreme Court noted, Harlan’s often quoted concurrence bears repeating,“Justice Harlan explained that, for a person to demonstrate an expectation of privacy,‘there is a twofold requirement. ’First, that person must‘ have exhibited an actual (subjective) expectation of privacy and, second, ... the expectation must be one that society is prepared to recognize as reasonable.’”

After Kurtz’s suppression motion was denied,he was convicted at trial of multiple rapes. The Superior Court affirmed his conviction and the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ultimately granted Kurtz’s allowance of appeal at Commonwealth v. Kurtz, 98, 99, and 100 MAP 2023.

Initially, the Supreme Court determined, “In this case, we must decide whether a person who conducts general, unprotected internet searches has an expectation of privacy in the records generated by those searches.”

The court continued, “The internet is now commingled with most, if not all, of our personal and professional activities that does not mean that a person automatically has a constitutionally reasonable expectation of privacy in its general usage.”

The court suggested that an individual’s use of the internet in her own home—a place often viewed by the U.S. Constitution as an individual’s most sacred and protected refuge, is not automatically protected. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court acknowledged, “At the heart of the Fourth Amendment‘ stands the right of a man to retreat into his own home and there be free from unreasonable governmental intrusion.’”

The majority opinion in Kurtz, written by Justice David Wecht and issued on Dec. 16, 2025, took care to examine a number of well-known U.S. Supreme Court decisions establishing, and later restraining the “third-party doctrine.” The doctrine stands for the premise that if an individual makes personal matters accessible to a third party, that person cannot then invoke the protections of the Fourth Amendment.

The U.S. Supreme Court began to narrow the third-party doctrine in United States v. Jones, 565 U.S. 400 (2012), in which the court held that attaching a GPS device to a vehicle and using satellite technology to track the operator’s movements in that vehicle constituted a “search” under the Fourth Amendment and requires a search warrant..

The Kurtz opinion then focused on Carpenter v. United States, 585 U.S. __(2018). Police had retrieved cellphone numbers from a member of a burglary ring. Investigators then obtained the cellphone site location information (CSLI) without a search warrant. The U.S. Supreme Court held a person does not make a voluntary choice to place CSLI generated by cellphone use into the hands of third parties. Rather, such transmission happens automatically.
Based on the analysis of the third-party doctrine and its subsequent treatment, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court reasoned that the resolution of Kurtz’s claim hung“upon whether such actions are governed by Carpenter’s “narrow” rejection of the third-party doctrine, or fall instead under the traditional third-party doctrine.”

Wecht wrote, “the pedestal upon which the Fourth Amendment places the home crumbles when “a person knowingly exposes [private material] to the public. ”While “a man’s home is, for most purposes, a place where he expects privacy,” that privacy does not extend to those “objects, activities, or statements that he exposes to the plain view of outsiders.”

The court continued, “The point is that the data trail created by using the internet is not involuntary in the same way that the trail created by carrying a cellphone is.” An individual should not be surprised that there is no reasonable expectation of privacy in Google searches, “It is common knowledge that websites, internet-based applications, and internet service providers collect, and then sell, user data.”

The court ruled in Kurtz that an individual does not have a reasonable expectation of privacy with regard to internet searches, in this case the simple, and prolific decision to “Google it.”

The court did not make access to internet searches unlimited. The court made clear that internet users who take efforts “to secure some degree of privacy” may be afforded greater constitutional privacy protections. The court pointed to use of virtual private networks, internet browsers that do not collect or share data, and websites that are password-protected as examples of internet use that may permit users to “retain a constitutionally recognizable expectation of privacy.”

Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg, Garbett, Kelly and George and the former district attorney of Lawrence County, Pennsylvania.He is the author of "The Executioner’s Toll." You can follow him on Bluesky @matthewmangino.bsky.social or contact him at mmangino@lgkg.com.

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SCOTUS sustains standard for emergency entry of a home without a warrant

The Supreme Court has ruled that law enforcement officials had flexibility to enter a home without a warrant based on reports that someone inside might need emergency help, a decision with implications for police tactics and the expectation of privacy in one’s home, reported The New York Times.

In a unanimous decision, the justices said that the police in Montana had acted appropriately when they entered an Army veteran’s home without a warrant because they had an “‘objectively reasonable basis for believing’ that a homeowner intended to take his own life and, indeed, may already have shot himself,” Justice Elena Kagan wrote for the court.

The Fourth Amendment of the Constitution prohibits unreasonable searches and provides protections for a person’s home by generally prohibiting law enforcement from entering without a warrant.

The Supreme Court has carved out several exceptions, including for when police believe an occupant is seriously injured or facing an imminent threat of injury.

The question in the Montana case was what level of certainty police must have that an emergency is underway before they can enter a home without a warrant.

Police were called to the home of William Trevor Case in September 2021 by his ex-girlfriend, who feared he was suicidal. The Army veteran had a loaded handgun, she told police, and he had previously threatened to kill himself.

Mr. Case was well known to law enforcement officers who went to check on him at his home near Butte, Mont. Mr. Case had “tried this suicide by cop” stuff before, one of the officers said, using profanity, according to a body-cam recording of the police response.

The officers knocked on Mr. Case’s door, yelled and shined flashlights through the windows. They could see empty beer cans, an empty handgun holster and a notepad with handwriting, which the officers thought was a possible suicide note, court records show. After about 40 minutes, they entered through the unlocked front door without a warrant.

When Mr. Case suddenly emerged from a closet, he stretched out his arm with what appeared to be a gun, and an officer shot him in the abdomen. The veteran, who survived, was convicted of assaulting the officer.

He appealed that conviction, arguing that a gun and other evidence from his home should not have been allowed to be presented at trial because the officers had violated the Fourth Amendment by coming into his home without a warrant.

Mr. Case’s lawyer told the court that police should have met a high bar of “probable cause” for the intrusion — a standard his lawyer said would provide “a level of certainty that avoids needless and dangerous confrontations, and enables police and emergency medical workers to provide aid when occupants urgently need it.”

But the court on Wednesday declined to adopt that higher standard, which would have been borrowed from the criminal context. Instead, it reaffirmed a 2006 decision: that it is not a violation of the Fourth Amendment when the police make a warrantless entry, if officers have an “objectively reasonable” basis to believe that an occupant is “seriously injured or threatened with such injury.”

The court said it was reasonable for the police to believe Mr. Case needed emergency aid, based on the phone call with Mr. Case’s ex-girlfriend and what the officers could observe at the Army veteran’s home.

“If Case had already shot himself, he could have been severely injured and in need of immediate medical care. And if he had not, the risk of suicide remained acute, given all the facts then known to the officers,” Justice Kagan wrote.

Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Neil M. Gorsuch joined the majority but wrote separately, with Justice Sotomayor cautioning that it may not always be “objectively reasonable” for police responding to a mental health crisis to make a warrantless entry.

She cited studies showing that people with serious mental health conditions were disproportionately likely to be injured and killed during police interactions compared to the general population. The justice also warned that the presence of law enforcement could escalate such situations, “putting both the occupant and the officers in danger.”

The “objectively reasonable basis” test affirmed by the court, Justice Sotomayor wrote, “demands careful attention to the case-specific risks that attend mental health crises, and requires officers to act reasonably in response.”

In response to the ruling, the Constitutional Accountability Center, which had filed a brief in support of Mr. Case’s position, expressed concern that the court’s decision would do nothing to prevent officers from using emergency aid as a pretext for home intrusions.

Austin Knudsen, Montana’s attorney general, praised the court’s ruling, saying in a statement that it would give law enforcement the ability to respond to life-threatening emergencies and “allow officers to continue to keep their communities and citizens safe to the best of their abilities.”

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F.B.I. flouts Privacy Protection Act and searches reporter's home

F.B.I. agents searched the home of a Washington Post reporter as part of a leak investigation, a significant escalation in the Trump administration’s tactics in seeking information from the news media, reported Slate.

It is exceedingly rare, even in investigations of classified disclosures, for federal agents to search a reporter’s home. A 1980 law called the Privacy Protection Act generally bars search warrants for reporters’ work materials, unless the reporters themselves are suspected of committing a crime related to the materials.

The Washington Post reporter, Hannah Natanson, had spent the past year covering the Trump administration’s effort to fire federal workers and redirect much of the work force toward enforcing his agenda. Many of those employees shared with her their anger, frustration and fear with the administration’s changes.

A spokesperson for The Washington Post said on Wednesday that the publication was reviewing and monitoring the situation. The law enforcement agents seized laptops, a phone and a smartwatch during their search.

In a message to staff, Matt Murray, the executive editor of The Post, said neither Ms. Natanson nor the paper was a focus of the investigation.

“Nonetheless, this extraordinary, aggressive action is deeply concerning and raises profound questions and concern around the constitutional protections for our work,” he wrote.

Court documents indicate that law enforcement officials were investigating Aurelio Perez-Lugones, a system administrator in Maryland who has a top-secret security clearance and has been accused of gaining access to and taking home classified intelligence reports that were found in his lunchbox and basement.

It is unclear whether the F.B.I. sought other means of obtaining the information it was seeking from The Post.

According to the F.B.I. affidavit, Mr. Perez-Lugones’s job meant he had access to sensitive information. It said he had printed confidential documents that he was not authorized to search for and took notes this year on a classified report related to government activity.

The court papers show investigators suspected Mr. Perez-Lugones in recent months of illegally mishandling classified information about an unidentified country.

In a statement on social media, Attorney General Pam Bondi said that the search was executed at the request of the Pentagon to look for evidence at the home of a journalist “who was obtaining and reporting classified and illegally leaked information from a Pentagon contractor.”

Free speech experts condemned the move as an aggressive escalation that could undercut press freedom.

Jameel Jaffer, the director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, pointed to the chilling effect it could have “on legitimate journalistic activity.”

Bruce D. Brown, the president of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, called the search one of the most invasive steps law enforcement could take. He said federal laws and policies limited searches to the most extreme cases, lest such a step chill the public interest in a free flow of information to the news media beyond the case in question.

“While we won’t know the government’s arguments about overcoming these very steep hurdles until the affidavit is made public,” Mr. Brown said, “this is a tremendous escalation in the administration’s intrusions into the independence of the press.”

In a first-person account of her experience talking to federal employees, Ms. Natanson quoted some of the messages she would receive.

“I understand the risks,” one Defense Department worker told her. “But getting the truth and facts out is so much more important.”

Another message, by a Justice Department staff member, read, “I’d never thought I’d be leaking info like this.”

The Justice Department’s use of a search warrant to obtain a reporter’s material was treated across party lines as a scandal in 2013. It was revealed that investigators in a leak case had portrayed a Fox News reporter as a criminal in applying for a court order to obtain the contents of the reporter’s email account.

Because Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. had recently testified to Congress that he knew of no effort to prosecute reporters in leak investigations, Republicans accused him of perjury. In response, the Justice Department explained that it never intended to charge the Fox reporter and had portrayed the reporter as a criminal to get around the 1980 law.

In the aftermath, Mr. Holder issued a policy forbidding the Justice Department from portraying reporters as criminals to get search warrants for their notes and work materials unless it truly intended to prosecute them.

In 2021, Attorney General Merrick B. Garland bolstered that policy after it came to light that late in President Trump’s first term, the Justice Department sought the phone and email records of reporters at The Washington Post, The New York Times and CNN as part of leak investigations. He flatly barred the use of search warrants and subpoenas to seize reporting materials or to require reporters to testify about their sources.

Last year, however, Ms. Bondi rolled back the Garland policy, restoring the ability of investigators to use search warrants and subpoenas to obtain reporters’ information. She largely restored the Holder-era policy, including a requirement to exhaust other means of obtaining evidence first before targeting reporters’ information.

But Ms. Bondi made a crucial change: She dropped the constraint Mr. Holder added that barred circumventing the 1980 law by portraying a reporter as a criminal suspect in bad faith.

While Mr. Holder insisted that he would never allow the Justice Department to prosecute a reporter for doing his or her job, however, it is not clear whether the Justice Department under Ms. Bondi has the same view.

A World War I law called the Espionage Act says it is a crime to disseminate sensitive information about the national defense without authorization, and on its face it would seem to apply to journalists who write about matters the government has deemed classified. But it has been widely considered to be a violation of the First Amendment to try to apply that law to journalists, and for generations, the Justice Department did not attempt to do so.

During the first Trump administration, however, the department breached that barrier by bringing Espionage Act charges against Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, for publishing classified documents leaked to the organization by Chelsea Manning, a former Army intelligence analyst.

While Mr. Assange is not a traditional journalist, the charges treated journalistic-style activities — receiving and disseminating classified information — as something that could be treated as a crime. In 2024, the Biden administration reached a plea deal with Mr. Assange on that charge to resolve his case, so its constitutionality was never tested on appeal.

Mr. Trump himself was charged under the Espionage Act in 2023 and accused of keeping classified documents without authorization after he left office and obstructing government efforts to get them back. Prosecutors had to abandon that case, along with a separate indictment for his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, after he was re-elected president in 2024.

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CREATORS: When Can an ICE Agent Shoot Into A Moving Vehicle?

 Matthew T. Mangino
CREATORS
January 13, 2026

On Jan. 7, 2026, Renee Nicole Good was fatally shot by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in Minneapolis, Minn. The shooting occurred during an ICE enforcement operation and has sparked nationwide protests.

In the moments before the shooting, Good is heard telling the agent that she wasn't mad at him, and the agent, identified as Jonathan Ross, began to circle her vehicle. She backs up her vehicle as Ross crosses in front of her, then she slowly begins to move forward and turns to the right. Ross is near her left headlight when he fires three shots into the vehicle, killing Good.

According to The New York Times, in the last four months, immigration officers have fired on at least nine people in five states and Washington, D.C. All of the individuals targeted in those shootings were, like Good, fired on while in their vehicles.

The pattern raises serious concerns. According to Reason Magazine, for decades, police officers have been trained not to shoot at moving vehicles. New York City's police department banned firing at unarmed drivers in 1972. After it did so, police shootings plummeted in the city. The country's 25 largest police departments generally prohibit firing at vehicles, according to the Times.

Seth Stoughton, a former police officer and current professor of criminal justice at the University of South Carolina, told Reason, "First, we need to keep in mind the legal rules that justify shooting at all ... officers can use deadly force when the subject is reasonably perceived as presenting an imminent threat of death or great bodily harm."

"So, at a very big picture level, we have to answer the question of: Did the officer reasonably perceive an imminent threat of death or great bodily harm? If the answer is no, there shouldn't be a shooting," continued Stoughton.

According to Reuters, there is no universal law enforcement training standard for firing into vehicles. But most police departments and federal policy bar shooting at a moving vehicle unless the driver poses an imminent threat of deadly force beyond the car itself.

Experts say firing at a moving car is one of the riskiest forms of lethal force, increasing the chance of stray gunfire or a loss of vehicle control that can endanger innocent bystanders. Why not just move away from the vehicle? Justice Department policy says deadly force is allowed only when no reasonable alternative exists, including stepping out of the vehicle's path.

The law has long been that police officers cannot use deadly force solely to arrest someone or to disable a fleeing vehicle if the person does not pose an immediate threat. According to The Associated Press, federal law enforcement officers operate under similar guidance.

The operating manual of the Department of Justice mandates that firearms should not be used simply to disable a moving vehicle. The policy allows deadly force only in limited circumstances, such as when someone in the vehicle is threatening another person with deadly force or when the vehicle itself is being used in a way that poses an imminent risk and no reasonable alternative exists but deadly force.

In the wake of Good's killing, President Donald Trump was asked if he believed deadly force was necessary in this case. His response: "It was highly disrespectful of law enforcement. The woman and her friend were highly disrespectful of law enforcement."

Vanita Gupta, a former associate attorney general who oversaw both the civil rights division that can prosecute federal agents and the civil division that defends them, told The New York Times, "Being 'disrespectful' does not warrant the use of deadly force."

Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg, Garbett, Kelly & George P.C. His book The Executioner's Toll, 2010, was released by McFarland Publishing. You can reach him at www.mattmangino.com and follow him on Twitter @MatthewTMangino

On Jan. 7, 2026, Renee Nicole Good was fatally shot by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in Minneapolis, Minn. The shooting occurred during an ICE enforcement operation and has sparked nationwide protests.

In the moments before the shooting, Good is heard telling the agent that she wasn't mad at him, and the agent, identified as Jonathan Ross, began to circle her vehicle. She backs up her vehicle as Ross crosses in front of her, then she slowly begins to move forward and turns to the right. Ross is near her left headlight when he fires three shots into the vehicle, killing Good.

According to The New York Times, in the last four months, immigration officers have fired on at least nine people in five states and Washington, D.C. All of the individuals targeted in those shootings were, like Good, fired on while in their vehicles.

The pattern raises serious concerns. According to Reason Magazine, for decades, police officers have been trained not to shoot at moving vehicles. New York City's police department banned firing at unarmed drivers in 1972. After it did so, police shootings plummeted in the city. The country's 25 largest police departments generally prohibit firing at vehicles, according to the Times.

Seth Stoughton, a former police officer and current professor of criminal justice at the University of South Carolina, told Reason, "First, we need to keep in mind the legal rules that justify shooting at all ... officers can use deadly force when the subject is reasonably perceived as presenting an imminent threat of death or great bodily harm."

"So, at a very big picture level, we have to answer the question of: Did the officer reasonably perceive an imminent threat of death or great bodily harm? If the answer is no, there shouldn't be a shooting," continued Stoughton.

According to Reuters, there is no universal law enforcement training standard for firing into vehicles. But most police departments and federal policy bar shooting at a moving vehicle unless the driver poses an imminent threat of deadly force beyond the car itself.

Experts say firing at a moving car is one of the riskiest forms of lethal force, increasing the chance of stray gunfire or a loss of vehicle control that can endanger innocent bystanders. Why not just move away from the vehicle? Justice Department policy says deadly force is allowed only when no reasonable alternative exists, including stepping out of the vehicle's path.

The law has long been that police officers cannot use deadly force solely to arrest someone or to disable a fleeing vehicle if the person does not pose an immediate threat. According to The Associated Press, federal law enforcement officers operate under similar guidance.

The operating manual of the Department of Justice mandates that firearms should not be used simply to disable a moving vehicle. The policy allows deadly force only in limited circumstances, such as when someone in the vehicle is threatening another person with deadly force or when the vehicle itself is being used in a way that poses an imminent risk and no reasonable alternative exists but deadly force.

In the wake of Good's killing, President Donald Trump was asked if he believed deadly force was necessary in this case. His response: "It was highly disrespectful of law enforcement. The woman and her friend were highly disrespectful of law enforcement."

Vanita Gupta, a former associate attorney general who oversaw both the civil rights division that can prosecute federal agents and the civil division that defends them, told The New York Times, "Being 'disrespectful' does not warrant the use of deadly force."

Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg, Garbett, Kelly & George P.C. His book The Executioner's Toll, 2010, was released by McFarland Publishing. You can reach him at www.mattmangino.com and follow him on Twitter @MatthewTMangino

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Mangino discusses Tepe murders on WFMJ-TV21

Watch my interview with Lindsay McCoy on WFMJ-TV21 about the Tepe murders in Columbus, Ohio.

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Federal immigration agents have shot into vehicles at least 13 times in the last six months

Here is a block of news worth reading from The Marshall Project:

When is deadly police force justified? Police officers are taught not to fire their weapons into vehicles. ICE agents haven’t had the same training. Mother Jones Federal immigration agents have shot into vehicles at least 13 times since July. The Wall Street Journal As protests against ICE agents grow, ICE officials tell agents to take “appropriate and decisive” action against perceived threats. The New York Times Even before Renee Good was named, the Trump administration began re-writing the history of her killing. Wired This isn’t a new problem. In the past, federal immigration agents have intentionally stepped in front of moving vehicles to justify shooting at drivers. The Nation TMP Context: Use of force by ICE agents. The Marshall Project