Leo Feler, an American citizen and homeowner in Chicago, was away on a business trip when he received an alert from his Ring doorbell. What he saw when he answered left him traumatized as he watched masked, heavily armed Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents raid, search, and damage his property—all without a warrant and in violation of his constitutional rights.
Last fall, during the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Operation Midway Blitz, Feler hired a reputable contractor to have the windows and siding replaced on his home, a three-unit residential building on the city’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 work on Feler’s home.
“I didn’t know their immigration status, and I didn’t ask,” Feler said in a video published by IJ. But according to his attorney, Feler’s Fourth Amendment rights don’t depend on who is working on his house.
Just before noon on October 24, 2025, the four construction workers sat in front of his home eating their lunch when two unmarked vehicles suddenly sped toward the house and abruptly stopped. Clips of the incident published by IJ show how the chaotic scene unfolded. Masked agents, later identified as CBP agents, sprang from the vehicles as the workers scattered: One worker ran down the street, while three others ran towards the house. A worker alerted Feler through the Ring doorbell as he ran inside.
When Feler answered, he saw “masked agents with guns had jumped over the gates, [yelling] ‘Whose fucking house is this? Whose fucking house is this?'” according to Feler. “They were running after the workers towards the back of the house.”
After attempting to break through the locked front gate, the agents scaled Feler’s nearly 6-foot fence and ran inside the property as Feler watched the live feed helplessly. “You are not allowed on the property,” he said over his home security system and repeatedly demanded the agents “get off my property.”
Undeterred, the agents continued to pursue the workers, entering Feler’s enclosed backyard and private garage. The agents even climbed inside his private balcony, attempting to detain one of the workers. “Those areas are my private space,” Feler said. “You shouldn’t be able to come up there.”
Indeed, curtilage is the enclosed area immediately surrounding a home, and is considered a part of the home for many Fourth Amendment purposes. But even though one of Feler’s tenants living on the property demanded to see a warrant and did not consent to any search of the property, she too was simply ignored.
The agents stopped short of pursuing the two workers that made it into Feler’s house, but did detain one worker inside the private-access garage, an area likely covered by the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement. After the agents left, Feler rushed home to find his fences and air-conditioning unit damaged, his front gate lock broken, his construction supplies trampled, and even puddles of blood inside his home from an injury sustained by one of the workers.
In court proceedings following the raid, the government admitted the worker detained in Feler’s garage had been arrested without a warrant, according to the complaint. And there is currently no evidence to suggest that the agents had 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,” reads the lawsuit, “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 a crime was taking place, and no exception to the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement, IJ argues, it seems the agents merely “saw a group of construction workers eating lunch,” and “targeted Feler’s property based on nothing more than the workers’ race and their employment as construction workers.”
What happened at Feler’s home is just the kind of rights-violating stop many feared would inevitably result after the Supreme Court blessed the DHS’ use of racial profiling to conduct investigatory stops last September. But as Justice Brett Kavanaugh observed in his concurring opinion to assuage critics’ concerns about rights violations, like the use of excessive force, “the Fourth Amendment prohibits such action, and remedies should be available in federal court.”
But whether the federal court will accept Feler’s attempts to hold the CBP officers accountable after they trespassed on and damaged his property in violation of the Constitution remains to be seen. Regardless of the steep uphill battle ahead, Feler believes suing the government and the offending officers is the right thing to do. “I’m bringing this lawsuit not because of immigration,” said Feler, “but because of the Constitution that prevents federal agents from jumping over a fence onto private property without warrant and without cause.”
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