Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2008
Abstract
This Article examines privacy rights for noncitizens in the context of the recent immigration raids in peoples' homes and the workplace. The Immigration and Customs Enforcement Office is conducting these raids with general or defective warrants and executes them in a discriminating dragnet-style, mostly against Latinos. The Fourth Amendment, however, provides little protection to immigrants and their families. This Article explores how law's construction of immigrants' illegality interplays with Fourth Amendment doctrines of consent, reasonable expectation of privacy, pretextual stops, and administrative searches to deny immigrants privacy's protection. In addition, the Article explores the spread of immigration databases and the proliferation of federal and local regulation of spaces occupied by immigrants within the border to examine the legal justifications for these generalized and defective warrants. The Article concludes by urging courts to reconsider reliance on immigrants' unlawful presence in the U.S. to excuse law enforcement abuses and offers several legal and policy reasons in favor of privacy protection for noncitizens.
Publication Title
U.C. Davis L. Rev.
Volume
41
First Page
1081
Recommended Citation
Raquel Aldana, Of Katz and "Aliens": Privacy Expectations and the Immigration Raids, 41 U.C. DAVIS L. REV. 1081 (2008).
