When Persons Aren’t People: The Fourth Amendment and Immigration Surveillance

Immigration enforcement now runs on surveillance. Ankle monitors, facial recognition, location tracking, and the rapidly expanding Alternatives to Detention program place hundreds of thousands of noncitizens under continuous monitoring, yet these tools have drawn strikingly little constitutional scrutiny. Juan Caballero, Seattle University School of Law, traces the reason to a single Supreme Court decision, United States v. Verdugo-Urquidez, which classified many noncitizens as "persons" rather than "people" and placed them outside the core protections of the Fourth Amendment. This program examines how that distinction operates in the modern immigration apparatus, why Fourth Amendment doctrine built for criminal investigations maps poorly onto civil immigration enforcement, and where the resulting gaps leave noncitizen communities exposed. Attorneys advising noncitizen clients will leave with a clearer framework for identifying surveillance-based challenges and understanding the constitutional terrain that governs them.