We spent a lot of time last year calling out how dangerous it was that Elon Musk and his inexperienced 4chan-loving DOGE boys were gaining access to some of the most secure government systems. We also highlighted how it seemed likely that they were violating many laws in the process. One specific point of concern was DOGE’s desire to take control over Social Security data, something that many people warned would be abused for political reasons, in particular to make misleading or false claims about voting records.

For all the people who insisted that this was hyperbolic nonsense, and DOGE was just there to root out “waste, fraud, and abuse,” well… the DOJ last week quietly admitted that the DOGE boys almost certainly violated the Hatch Act and had given social security data to conspiracy theorists claiming Trump won the 2020 election (he did not).

Oh, and this only came out because the DOJ realized it had lied to a court (they claim it was because the Social Security Administration officials had given them bad info, but the net effect is the same) and had to correct the record.

Shapiro’s previously unreported disclosure, dated Friday, came as part of a list of “corrections” to testimony by top SSA officials during last year’s legal battles over DOGE’s access to Social Security data. They revealed that DOGE team members shared data on unapproved “third-party” servers and may have accessed private information that had been ruled off-limits by a court at the time.

Shapiro said the case of the two DOGE team members appeared to undermine a previous assertion by SSA that DOGE’s work was intended to “detect fraud, waste and abuse” in Social Security and modernize the agency’s technology.

From the actual filing in the case:

Also in his March 12 declaration, Mr. Russo attested that, “[t]he overall goal of the work performed by SSA’s DOGE Team is to detect fraud, waste and abuse in SSA programs and to provide recommendations for action to the Acting Commissioner of SSA, the SSA Office of the Inspector General, and the Executive Office of the President.”….

However, SSA determined in its recent review that in March 2025, a political advocacy group contacted two members of SSA’s DOGE Team with a request to analyze state voter rolls that the advocacy group had acquired. The advocacy group’s stated aim was to find evidence of voter fraud and to overturn election results in certain States. In connection with these communications, one of the DOGE team members signed a “Voter Data Agreement,” in his capacity as an SSA employee, with the advocacy group. He sent the executed agreement to the advocacy group on March 24, 2025.

The filing goes on to admit that the declaration from a Social Security administration employee that there were safeguards in place against sharing data, and that everyone had received training in not sharing data, was apparently wrong.

However, SSA has learned that, beginning March 7, 2025, and continuing until March 17 (approximately one week before the TRO was entered), members of SSA’s DOGE Team were using links to share data through the third-party server “Cloudflare.” Cloudflare is not approved for storing SSA data and when used in this manner is outside SSA’s security protocols. SSA did not know, until its recent review, that DOGE Team members were using Cloudflare during this period. Because Cloudflare is a third-party entity, SSA has not been able to determine exactly what data were shared to Cloudflare or whether the data still exist on the server.

Cool cool. No big deal. DOGE boys just put incredibly private data on a third party server and no one knows what data was there or even if it’s still there.

Have I got some waste, fraud, and abuse for you to check out!

Separately, the filing reveals that Elon Musk’s right hand man, Steve Davis—the “fixer” Musk deploys across all his organizations—was copied on an email containing an encrypted file of SSA data. The filing is careful to note that DOGE itself “never had access to SSA systems of record,” but that’s a distinction without much difference when your guy is getting emailed password-protected files derived from those systems. Oh and: SSA still can’t open the file to figure out exactly what was in it.

However, SSA has determined that on March 3, 2025—three weeks prior to entry of the TRO—an SSA DOGE Team member copied Mr. Steve Davis, who was then a senior advisor to Defendant U.S. DOGE Temporary Organization, as well as a DOGE-affiliated employee at the Department of Labor (“DOL”), on an email to Department of Homeland Security (“DHS”). The email attached an encrypted and password-protected file that SSA believes contained SSA data. Despite ongoing efforts by SSA’s Chief Information Office, SSA has been unable to access the file to determine exactly what it contained. From the explanation of the attached file in the email body and based on what SSA had approved to be released to DHS, SSA believes that the encrypted attachment contained PII derived from SSA systems of record, including names and addresses of approximately 1,000 people.

Looks like some more waste, fraud, and abuse right there.

So to recap: the team that stormed in to root out “waste, fraud, and abuse” committed what looks an awful lot like actual fraud and abuse—sharing data on unauthorized servers, misleading courts, cutting deals with election conspiracy groups, and emailing around encrypted files of PII that the agency itself can’t even open anymore. All of it now documented in federal court filings—not that anyone will do anything about it. Accountability is for people who don’t have Elon Musk on speed dial.

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The thing afforded the highest protections of the Fourth Amendment is a person’s home. This isn’t even a controversial statement. It has been that way ever since this amendment was ratified.

But, under Trump, we’re constantly seeing that the administration considers all rights to be privileges — something only granted to people this administration likes.

The Associated Press has obtained a blockbuster leak — one that shows ICE officers have been told that they’re free to enter homes without a judicial warrant. Instead, they can just write themselves an administrative warrant and then just go about their business of terrorizing a nation.

ICE carries around things they call warrants, but hardly resemble the real thing. An administrative warrant is self-issuing. The officer who wants to use it only needs to fill in a few blanks and sign it before heading out to try to arrest the person listed on the paperwork. There’s no signature line for supervisors, which means these aren’t reviewed by anyone else but the person writing them.

But since last May, ICE officers have been instructed they can treat these pieces of paper like actual warrants — you know, the ones that are subjected to at least a cursory review by a judge.

The whistleblower report [PDF] contains screenshots of the memo issued by ICE head Todd Lyons, last seen here complaining repeatedly about people who complain about ICE officers acting like paramilitary kidnapping squads.

What’s contained in that memo is batshit insane. First of all, it’s the DHS telling itself that it’s okay to ignore the Fourth Amendment.

Although the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has not historically relied on administrative warrants alone to arrest aliens subject to final orders of removal in their place of residence, the DHS Office of the General Counsel has recently determined that the U.S. Constitution, the Immigration and Nationality Act, and the immigration regulations do not prohibit relying on administrative warrants for this purpose.

There’s a very good reason the DHS has “not historically relied” on administrative warrants to enter people’s homes in search of arrestable migrants. That reason would be the US Constitution, which only “recently” fell out of favor with the GOP ruling class.

According to Lyons and the completely compromised DHS Office of the Legal Counsel, the only thing needed to engage in what is absolutely a warrantless entry is a final order of removal. A couple of paragraphs later, the memo states explicitly what ICE officers are authorized to do under the power of this memo (which definitely isn’t what they’re authorized to do under the Constitution):

Should the alien refuse admittance, ICE officers and agents should use only a necessary and reasonable amount of force to enter the alien’s residence…

You can write a memo and issue it and claim the in-house lawyers said it was all cool and legal, but that still doesn’t make it cool and legal. All it does is add another layer of “good faith” to ICE officers’ violations of the Fourth Amendment. After all, if they were told they could do this, how could they be expected to know it was actually illegal?

A footnote follows that, which makes it clear ICE officers will engage in warrantless entries even if they haven’t actually obtained a final order of removal.

This scoping is not intended to concede that an administrative warrant would be insufficient to arrest an alien in his or her place of residence prior to a final order of removal or where there is a final order of removal issued by an immigration officer.

In other words, ICE officers can enter any alleged migrant’s house without a warrant at pretty much any time, so long as they’re carrying their self-issued non-warrants (the Form I-205 referenced throughout the memo).

This directly contradicts ERO (Enforcement and Removal Operations) training for ICE officers, which is included in the leaked documents the AP obtained. That training spells it out succinctly and explicitly (caps in the original):

An administrative arrest warrant does NOT alone authorize a 4th Amendment search of any kind.

That’s no longer the case, apparently. It’s not like this training has been rescinded. It seemingly remains on the books because it creates even more plausible deniability for officers being sued.

And ICE director Todd Lyons (along with his OLC enablers) know the contents of this memo can’t possibly be legal. That’s why this memo has never been officially added to ERO training or otherwise officially made part of the ICE operations manual. If Lyons and other top immigration enforcement officials actually thought this shit would hold in court, they wouldn’t have done this:

While addressed to “All ICE Personnel,” in practice the May 12 Memo has not been formally distributed to all personnel. Instead, the May 12 Memo has been provided to select DHS officials who are then directed to verbally brief the new policy for action. Those supervisors then show the Memo to some employees, like our clients, and direct them to read the Memo and return it to the supervisor.

In the case of the whistleblower who gave this to the Associated Press, they were instructed to read it and return it. They were not allowed to take notes. They were also informed that another employee had been reassigned for questioning ICE policies, which was taken by the whistleblower as the overt threat it is.

This is fucking insane. A federal government agency has decided the Fourth Amendment no longer exists and has done everything it can from keeping this clearly unconstitutional policy change from spreading beyond those who’ve already bought into the DHS’s new direction as the expression of the GOP’s white nationalist goals.

And it’s a problem that’s only going to get exponentially worse as ICE frantically on-boards new hires, who are given plenty of cash, but nearly nonexistent training before being sent out to fulfill the racist desires of people like White House advisor Stephen Miller. What little they may know (or care) about constitutional rights is being eroded even further by official memos that claim it’s perfectly legal to do something that clearly — under the DHS’s own published training — violates the Fourth Amendment.

Without a doubt, the administration will shrug this off and/or tell people they shouldn’t believe things they’ve seen with their own eyes. For now, we can only hope this might knock a few Republicans out of the MAGA loop, even if it’s only the ones who realize they definitely wouldn’t want to turn this unearned expansion of power over to an administration not run by one of their own.