Should authorities be held to account for the unlawful raid and the damage to private property?
While on a business trip, Leo Feler—a Chicago resident and American citizen—received an alert from his Ring doorbell. The footage he watched upon answering left him stunned and shaken as masked, heavily armed officers from Customs and Border Protection (CBP) raided the property, conducted a search, and caused damage—all without a warrant and in clear violation of his constitutional rights.
In the autumn, amid the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Operation Midway Blitz, Feler engaged a reputable contractor to replace the windows and siding on his three-unit building on Chicago’s north side, according to a lawsuit filed in federal court by the Institute for Justice (IJ), a public interest law firm. Four workers were subcontracted to carry out the work on Feler’s property.
“I didn’t know their immigration status, and I didn’t ask,” Feler said in a video released by IJ. Yet his attorney contends that Feler’s Fourth Amendment protections do not hinge on who is doing the work on his home.
Just before noon on October 24, 2025, the four construction workers were sitting outside the house eating their lunch when two unmarked cars suddenly roared toward the property and halted abruptly. IJ’s published clips depict the chaotic moment: masked agents, later identified as CBP officers, leaped from the vehicles as the workers scattered—one sprinted down the street, while the other three moved toward the house. A worker alerted Feler through the Ring doorbell as he hurried inside.
When Feler answered, he saw “masked agents with guns had jumped over the gates, [yelling] ‘Whose house is this? Whose house is this?'” according to Feler. “They were chasing the workers toward the back of the house.”
Undeterred, the agents attempted to break through the locked front gate, then scaled Feler’s nearly six-foot fence and surged onto the property as Feler watched the live feed in distress. “You are not allowed on the property,” he said through his security system, repeating that they needed to leave.
Propelled forward, the officers pursued the workers, entering Feler’s enclosed backyard and private garage. They even climbed onto his private balcony in an effort to detain one of the workers. “Those areas are my private space,” Feler protested. “You shouldn’t be able to come up there.”
Indeed, curtilage refers to the area immediately surrounding a home, and is treated by many Fourth Amendment cases as part of the dwelling. Yet despite a tenant living on the property demanding to see a warrant and not consenting to any search, she was ignored as well.
The agents stopped short of pursuing the two workers who did enter Feler’s house, but they did detain one worker inside the private-access garage, an area that would typically fall under the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement. After the agents departed, Feler hurried home to discover damaged fencing and an air-conditioning unit, a broken front gate lock, trampled construction materials, and even pools of blood inside his home from injuries suffered by one of the workers.
In court proceedings following the raid, the government acknowledged that the worker detained in Feler’s garage had been arrested without a warrant, according to the complaint. There is currently no evidence to indicate that the agents possessed an arrest warrant for any of the workers hired to renovate Feler’s property, or that they even knew their names.
“On information and belief,” the lawsuit states, “none of the workers hired…was engaged in criminal activity… none was wanted for a crime,” and “the CBP officers had no reason to believe that any criminal activity was taking place on or near Feler’s property.” With no arrest warrant, no search warrant, no reasonable suspicion of crime, and no exception to the Fourth Amendment, IJ argues that the agents seemingly “saw a group of construction workers eating lunch,” and “targeted Feler’s property based solely on the workers’ race and their status as construction workers.”
What transpired at Feler’s home embodies the kind of rights-violating stop many feared would arise after the Supreme Court endorsed the DHS’s use of racial profiling to conduct investigatory stops last September. But Justice Brett Kavanaugh noted in his concurring opinion that, to ease concerns about rights violations such as excessive force, “the Fourth Amendment prohibits such action, and remedies should be available in federal court.”
Whether the federal judiciary will allow Feler to hold the CBP officers accountable for trespass and property damage in violation of the Constitution remains uncertain. Regardless of the steep odds ahead, Feler insists that pursuing legal action against the government and the implicated officers is the correct course. “I’m bringing this lawsuit not because of immigration,” Feler stated, “but because of the Constitution that prevents federal agents from leaping a fence onto private property without a warrant and without any justification.”
