This piece was originally published in the Charleston City Paper.
The first time I drove across town to verify a tip about ICE activity for the Charleston Immigrant Community Hotline, I took several calming breaths and repeated a mantra:
We still have rights.
As federal immigration agencies ratchet up their brazen abuse of citizens and non-citizens alike, we need to constantly remind each other of our rights. Our safety is not guaranteed, and we all need to make decisions to protect ourselves and our loved ones, but if we are going to outlast the mass deportation regime, it’s important to understand our rights as they exist today.
So let’s start here: The First Amendment still protects your right to record and share footage of law enforcement officers carrying out their official duties in public. That includes Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Border Patrol, and local police who collaborate with ICE via 287(g) agreements. As long as you do not interfere, keep the cameras rolling.
ICE and its enablers know we still have the right to observe and record, but they want us to be too afraid to exercise that right. That’s why, when South Carolina’s first rapid-response networks were forming in early 2025, Attorney General Alan Wilson sent a letter to organizers in Columbia warning they would be “prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law” if they engaged in “illegal activities.”
That’s … how laws work, yes, but the clear intent of the letter was to intimidate organizers. They were not intimidated. They continue to exercise their rights to this day.
Here’s another reminder: Regardless of your immigration status, you still have rights when you encounter ICE and Border Patrol agents. If you are stopped and questioned by immigration agents, you still have the right to remain silent, and you still do not have to discuss your immigration or citizenship status with them.
If immigration agents show up at your home, you still have the right to keep the door closed and ask to see a warrant. To enter and search a house or non-public area of a business, ICE still needs a valid judicial warrant issued by a court and signed by a judge.
You may have seen some news that casts doubt on these rights. A whistleblower revealed a Department of Homeland Security memo asserting that agents can enter homes without a signed judicial warrant. That memo contradicts the Fourth Amendment and a heap of Supreme Court precedent.
Proclaiming an end to our rights doesn’t make it so. We still have our rights.
Finally, while the Constitution stands, we have the right to criticize immigration agencies —loudly, vociferously, rudely if we choose. When, in response to people comparing his agents to the Gestapo, now-former Border Patrol Field Commander Greg Bovino whined to the press, “There are actions and consequences that come from those choices,” he may have thought he could chill our speech.
He failed. For days afterward, throngs of protesters from Minneapolis to Charleston heaped scorn on federal immigration agencies for the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. We owe it to their memories, and the memories of all people harmed by ICE, to keep exercising our rights when and where we can.
“Rights,” Hellen Keller once said, “are things we get when we are strong enough to make good our claim on them.” None of us are strong enough alone to assert our rights against wannabe secret police and an authoritarian government. Together, though, we might still be strong enough.
To learn more about your rights when facing ICE, visit aclusc.org/immigration.
Paul Bowers serves as communications director for the American Civil Liberties Union of South Carolina. He was previously a staff writer at Charleston City Paper from 2011 through 2015.
