President Javier Milei and Security Minister Patricia Bullrich have approved a reform of the Argentine Federal Police (PFA, by its Spanish initials) statute that will allow them to sweep social media looking for potential crimes and search people’s personal effects or vehicles without a judicial warrant in certain cases, such as protests.

The reform aims to re-orient the PFA’s operation towards “being an investigative police force” akin to the United States’ FBI. From now on, its main mission is “preventing, detecting and investigating federal and complex crimes and collaborating in dismantling criminal organizations”.

The decree approving the reform was published Tuesday in the Official Gazette, and Milei and Bullrich will provide more details in a press conference in the afternoon.

Changes include the creation of a graduate admissions and training program, something that is “common in investigative police in other countries and, in some cases, an essential requirement, such as in the United States’ FBI,” the decree mentioned.

Searches without warrants and other changes

The reform makes the PFA more independent from the judiciary, given it will now be able to conduct searches, arrests and social media sweeps without a judicial warrant.

Instead, the new statute gives more power to the Security Ministry. While it previously said the PFA’s role was to prevent crimes under the jurisdiction of national judges, it now says that the force has to carry out investigations at the orders of the Security Ministry and is simply “auxiliary to the judiciary.”

The decree said that the PFA can now act to “maintain public order and security spontaneously in the case of flagrant crime, at the requirement of the Security Ministry.” According to political scientist Marcelo Tilli, this means that “if the Security Ministry decides to control protests, now [the PFA] can investigate protesters without a judges’ warrant.”

It also allows the federal police to pat down and search people if they are engaged in activities that the police would normally be expected to control. In general, the police will still require a warrant to stop and search people. However, they can now search their personal belongings or vehicles without a judicial order if the circumstances “reasonably and objectively allow to presume they are hiding something related to a crime,” if there is a risk of evidence disappearing before a warrant arrives, or if the crime is committed in public.

The PFA will now be able to search social media and other public digital spaces for “crime prevention tasks” without a judicial order, and will have access to public databases and public information in order to “justifiably” carry out investigations or criminal intelligence tasks. With this goal, they can also request access to private databases.

In some cases, police will be allowed to arrest people without a judicial order. However, the statute offers vague guidelines on this, such as “substantiated circumstances that allow to presume someone could have committed or could commit a crime” and is not appropriately identifying themselves.

This means that a police officer may arrest someone just because they believe they could have committed a crime and are not providing their personal information. In this case, the person could be arrested “for the minimum required time to establish their identity” after notifying a judge, and for up to 10 hours.