A legal expert Thursday slammed Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem's claim that Americans should be ready to show proof of citizenship.
CNN senior legal analyst Elie Honig called out Noem's response after reporters outside the White House asked her why ICE agents in Minnesota were asking people to provide their identification and legal status.
"In every situation we are doing targeted enforcement," she said. "If we are on a target, and doing an operation, there may be individuals surrounding that criminal that we may be asking who they are and why they're there and having them validate their identity. That's what we've always done and asking people who that are so we know who's in those surroundings and if they are breaking our federal laws we will detain them as well until we run that processing."
Honig didn't mince words after Noem's comments.
"That's wrong. It's illegal and it's unconstitutional to require people to show their citizenship papers without some other basis to make a stop," he said. "So let me be clear. In order to stop somebody, detain them, question them for immigration purposes, an officer has to have reasonable suspicion. Now, that's a fairly low bar. It's lower than the bar that a law enforcement agent would need to make a stop or questioning for criminal purposes, but it's still a bar. It's not nothing."
Honig pointed to the recent Supreme Court ruling from a justice who reaffirmed that law enforcement needs reasonable suspicion to conduct searches or detain someone.
"In fact, just a few months ago, in September of 2025, Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote a concurring opinion in a Supreme Court case when he reiterated that U.S. immigration agents do have to have reasonable suspicion to stop somebody to detain them, even briefly, and to question them," Honig said.
"So what you cannot do is just go arbitrarily up to people or set up a checkpoint or go door to door and say, 'Hey, you need to prove to us that you're a U.S. citizen,'" he added. "The immigration officer needs to have some reasonable suspicion, articulable meaning, something you can explain in words to a court. Why did you stop this person? And Justice Kavanaugh gave immigration officers very broad latitude to do that. But even he reconfirmed just a few months ago that there is a bar. You have to show reasonable suspicion. You cannot just arbitrarily approach people and make them prove that they are, in fact, here legally."
Honig argued it would be hard for ICE agents to argue that just because someone is standing near an operation that they would need to disclose their citizenship or immigration status.
"That is quite a stretch," Honig said. "Why would standing around an ICE operation tend to indicate that somebody is in this country illegally? I think that would be a really hard one to justify in the court."
