Rep. André Carson gave the Department of Homeland Security until Wednesday to explain what ICE has been doing in Indianapolis. His letter runs eleven numbered demands, from the name of the operation to every arrest record in Marion County since January 1 to the body-camera footage. Nothing in federal law requires DHS to hand over a page of it.

Carson, the Indianapolis Democrat who represents most of the city and all of Marion County, sent the letter on September 2 to Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin and Acting ICE Director David Venturella. The full text is on his own House website. It is also, as a matter of law, a request, and that distinction matters more than anything in it.

What Carson is actually asking for

This is a demand for the entire operational file. Item one wants the operation's name if it has one, its probable cause objective, its statutory authorization and its geographic scope. Item three wants every person detained or arrested in Marion County between January 1 and September 1, broken out by date, warrant type and criminal history. Item eleven wants the operational plans, the internal communications, the dispatch records and the body-worn-camera footage.

The trigger, per the letter, was video of ICE agents chasing a man across several lanes of traffic near Post Road and Interstate 70 on September 1. Carson also asks whether ICE coordinated with the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department, the Marion County Sheriff's Office or Indiana State Police before any of it started.

Can one member of Congress make DHS answer?

No, and the answer has not been close for decades. The Congressional Research Service laid it out in a legal sidebar last November. An individual member, CRS wrote, "may not unilaterally convene an official committee hearing, initiate an official committee investigation, issue a subpoena, or seek enforcement of a subpoena through contempt."

CRS then quotes the D.C. Circuit: "disclosure of information can only be compelled by authority of Congress, its committees or subcommittees, not solely by individual members . . . . Election to the Congress does not give an individual subpoena power over whatever information he may happen to be interested in."

There is one statutory workaround, and Carson cannot use it. Under 5 U.S.C. § 2954, an executive agency "shall submit any information requested of it" when the request comes from seven members of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee or five members of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. Carson's committee assignments are Intelligence, Transportation and Infrastructure, and the select committee on the Chinese Communist Party. His intelligence subcommittee does cover DHS intelligence components, which is a real hook, but street arrests in Marion County are not an intelligence-community matter.

Indiana already settled the question Carson is raising

Months before any of this, the Indiana General Assembly took the local-cooperation question off the table. Senate Bill 76, the FAIRNESS Act, cleared the state Senate 37 to 11 in late February and became Senate Enrolled Act 76. Its employer mandates started July 1. Its government-cooperation provisions, per Faegre Drinker's reading of the enrolled text, "took effect upon the Act's passage." They bar any governmental body from adopting a rule or policy, written or unwritten, that restricts cooperation with federal immigration enforcement, with civil penalties up to $10,000 per knowing violation and Attorney General Todd Rokita holding the pen.

Read the statute next to the letter and the asymmetry is obvious. Indiana compelled Indianapolis to help ICE. Nobody compelled ICE to tell Indianapolis anything. Sen. Shelli Yoder, a Bloomington Democrat, warned during the debate that the bill would turn every public employee into "an extension of a federal enforcement agent." The obligation she was describing runs one direction only.

The city's "nobody told us" is true, and it is also a problem

Mayor Joe Hogsett's office said "neither the Mayor's Office nor any agency within the City-County enterprise has received any communication from federal immigration enforcement authorities regarding current or future operations in Marion County." IMPD said it "is not involved in any immigration enforcement operations." The Marion County Sheriff's Office told WFYI it had nothing beyond what local media were reporting.

Conservatives who back the enforcement should still notice item eight on Carson's list. Plainclothes federal agents in unmarked cars running foot pursuits across an interstate frontage road, with the local department told nothing, is an officer-safety exposure before it is a political one. IMPD units respond to what a 911 caller describes, and what a caller describes is masked armed men grabbing someone off a sidewalk.

The statistic Carson leans on is doing a lot of work

The letter's one hard number is that "more than 96% of individuals arrested by ICE nationwide" in July had no prior criminal convictions, sourced to a New York Times analysis published August 27. WFYI, summarizing the same analysis, wrote only that "a majority" of July arrestees had not been charged with or convicted of a crime. Those are different measurements, and no prior conviction is the more favorable of the two. Citing it is fair. Citing it is not the same as saying 96 percent of the people ICE picked up were bystanders.

What actually breaks the standoff

ICE told WFYI it enforces immigration law in all 50 states every day and declined to confirm any surge, then sent over a list of five Indiana arrests it called the worst of the worst without saying when they happened. Sen. Jim Banks went the other way, posting that "those who obstruct ICE operations in Indiana should be arrested and prosecuted" and that "we will not let Indianapolis become Minneapolis." About a hundred people turned out at the west-side ICE office Saturday, after a noise demonstration at a nearby Hampton Inn Thursday night, WFYI reported.

None of that produces a document. Two things do. A committee with jurisdiction can subpoena the records, and those gavels belong to the majority. Or Congress can attach reporting conditions to ICE money, the lever that has actually moved agencies before and the one Carson passed up when he voted against the funding instead of trying to shape it. Wednesday will come and go. The file stays where it is.