Learning From Illinois: Vermont Crafts Broader Bill to Hold Federal Officers Accountable
A Vermont Bill Would Let You Sue Federal Agents. Whether It Works Depends on a Case in Illinois.
When federal immigration agents show up at a Vermont home, a Vermont workplace, or — as happened in South Burlington on March 11 — a Vermont neighborhood, most Vermonters have formed an opinion about whether that’s appropriate. What far fewer people know is that if those agents cross a constitutional line while they’re here — conducting an unlawful search, detaining someone without legal basis, using excessive force — there is currently no practical way for the person harmed to hold them personally accountable in court.
That gap is not a political talking point. It is a documented legal reality, and it has been getting wider for years.
For most of American history, state courts handled this. If a federal officer violated your rights, you sued them the same way you’d sue anyone else who wronged you — under state law. Then in 1971, the U.S. Supreme Court added a federal option, allowing damages suits directly under the Constitution against individual federal agents. Over the following five decades, the Court steadily narrowed that federal option until a 2022 decision effectively closed it for immigration enforcement cases entirely, concluding that courts were not the right venue to second-guess how immigration agents do their jobs. Congress never stepped in with a replacement. The result is that a federal agent enforcing immigration law can violate a clearly established constitutional right, and the person harmed has no realistic path to individual accountability.
That is the problem H.849 — Vermont’s Constitutional Accountability Act — is designed to solve. Whether it actually can is a more complicated question than either its supporters or its critics have acknowledged.
What Happened in South Burlington, and What Was Already in the Works
On March 11, 2026, federal immigration agents spent most of the day attempting to execute a warrant at a residence on Dorset Street in South Burlington, near University Mall. About 150 protesters gathered. By evening, agents used pepper spray and pepper grenades to disperse the crowd. Three people were detained. Federal authorities later confirmed that the person named in the warrant was not among them. Two days later, the Vermont House passed H.849 by a 97–39 vote. The connection between those events is real — but it is not quite the one that most coverage implied. H.849 had been in the House Judiciary Committee since February. The South Burlington incident did not create the bill. What it did was remove whatever hesitation remained about bringing it to a floor vote immediately, and it delivered a margin that crossed party lines.
What the Bill Actually Does
H.849 creates a legal right — for any person in Vermont — to sue any government official who violates their U.S. constitutional rights while acting in an official capacity. That means federal agents, state troopers, and local police officers alike. The bill is modeled on a federal civil rights law that has governed accountability for state and local police since 1871, but which has never applied to federal officers. A successful lawsuit could result in financial damages, legal fees paid by the defendant, or a court order stopping the unconstitutional conduct.
The bill is sponsored by Rep. Martin LaLonde (D-South Burlington), who chairs the House Judiciary Committee. One of its key design features is that it preserves qualified immunity — a legal doctrine that protects officers from personal liability unless they violated a right that was “clearly established” at the time. In plain terms: officers who make a reasonable mistake in a genuinely ambiguous situation are still protected. Officers who violate rights that are beyond reasonable dispute are not. That is the same standard that already applies to local and state police under federal law. H.849 extends it to federal agents operating in Vermont.
Illinois Went First — and the Difference in Wording Matters a Lot
Vermont is not the first state to try this. Illinois passed a similar law in late 2025. The federal government sued Illinois within days, and that lawsuit is now working its way through federal court in the Southern District of Illinois. The case has not yet produced a ruling, but it has already revealed a significant problem with how Illinois wrote its law — a problem Vermont appears to have deliberately avoided.
Illinois limited its law specifically to federal “civil immigration enforcement.” The intention was to focus on the enforcement context that had prompted the legislation. But that specific wording handed the federal government one of its strongest legal arguments: that Illinois was not actually protecting constitutional rights in general — it was singling out a federal government function and making it harder to perform. There is a legal principle that states cannot pass laws that specifically target or burden what the federal government does. By naming immigration enforcement in the title, Illinois walked directly into that argument.
Vermont’s H.849 covers any government official acting in an official capacity — with no reference to immigration enforcement anywhere in the bill’s operative language. A federal immigration agent, a Vermont state trooper, and a local police officer all face the same standard under the bill. That broader framing is not an accident. The people who drafted H.849 read the Illinois complaint carefully. Whether or not they say so in public, they wrote a bill that is structurally harder to attack on the grounds that created the most trouble for Illinois. That does not make Vermont’s version immune from legal challenge — but it does make it a more defensible piece of legislation.
The Legal Obstacle Most Coverage Missed
Even setting aside the Illinois comparison, H.849 faces a procedural challenge that received almost no attention when the bill passed — and that could determine whether any lawsuit filed under it ever reaches a Vermont courtroom.
A 1988 federal law called the Westfall Act gives the federal government a powerful tool when one of its employees is sued. If the Justice Department certifies that the employee was doing their job when the alleged violation occurred, the federal government substitutes itself as the defendant, the individual agent steps out of the case, and the lawsuit then runs into a separate doctrine — sovereign immunity — that generally prevents people from suing the government without its consent. In practice, this mechanism can effectively end a lawsuit against a federal agent before it ever reaches the question of whether a constitutional violation actually happened.
The Westfall Act does contain one exception. It does not apply to lawsuits “brought for a violation of the Constitution of the United States.” The unresolved legal question — and this is the genuine crux of whether H.849 can function as an actual remedy — is whether that exception covers a state-created right to sue, or only the federal remedy that the Supreme Court has been dismantling for decades. Legal scholars writing in Lawfare and at the University of Wisconsin Law School have made a strong case that the plain language of the exception — which describes the purpose of a suit rather than its legal source — covers state laws like H.849. The legislative history from 1988 supports that reading. But no federal appeals court has ever ruled in a plaintiff’s favor on this question. The Third Circuit ruled against a similar claim in 2024, though in a case where the plaintiff had not even raised the constitutional exception argument — making it a thin and widely criticized precedent.
If courts ultimately read the exception narrowly, the practical effect is this: someone files a lawsuit under H.849, the Justice Department removes the case to federal court and steps in as defendant, and the suit is dismissed. The individual agent never faces personal accountability, and Vermont’s law functions as a statement of principle rather than an enforceable legal remedy. If courts read the exception broadly — as the weight of legal scholarship suggests they should — the lawsuits proceed and H.849 works as intended. That question is genuinely open.
The Case to Watch
The litigation that will produce the first real answer is United States v. State of Illinois, currently in the early stages in federal court in the Southern District of Illinois. The Justice Department has not yet asked the court for emergency relief to block the Illinois law while the case proceeds — a notable choice that suggests the federal government may prefer a full ruling on the merits rather than a faster but narrower emergency order. A district court decision is likely months away, with appeals beyond that.
If the Illinois court rules narrowly — finding problems specific to how Illinois wrote its law, rather than rejecting the entire concept of state accountability statutes — Vermont’s differently drafted H.849 could survive a similar challenge. If the court rules broadly that states simply cannot create this kind of right to sue federal officers under any circumstances, Vermont’s law faces the same outcome regardless of its better drafting. And if the case eventually reaches the U.S. Supreme Court, the question becomes whether a Court that has spent two decades limiting federal accountability for federal agents will allow states to fill that gap through their own laws. That would be a consequential ruling either way.
What Happens Next
H.849 now moves to the Vermont Senate, where it has not yet been assigned to a committee. Senate Judiciary is the expected destination. No hearing dates have been scheduled. Governor Phil Scott has not publicly stated a position on this bill specifically, and his office did not signal after the South Burlington incident whether he would sign or oppose legislation of this kind.
If the bill passes the Senate and is signed into law, it takes effect July 1, 2026. It then sits dormant until someone actually files a lawsuit under it. At that point, the Justice Department will almost certainly move to transfer the case to federal court and assert that the Westfall Act shields the individual agent. The constitutional fight begins there. Vermont will not be the first state to have that fight — Illinois will. But the outcome of the Illinois case will determine whether H.849 functions as the remedy its supporters intend, or whether it waits for a future Supreme Court willing to answer a question this one has so far avoided: when the federal government will not hold its own agents accountable, can the states?
More than a dozen states have introduced similar legislation in the past year. Vermont has written what may be the most carefully constructed version yet enacted. That carefulness matters — but it is not a guarantee. The legal ground here is genuinely unsettled, the stakes for federal-state relations are high, and the answer will come from courts that no state legislature controls.