In the wake of the Chicago South Shore raid—which reportedly saw masked U.S. agents rappelling down from a Black Hawk helicopter, bursting into a 130-unit building, kicking down doors, zip-tying and holding American citizens at gunpoint, and the detention of 37 Venezuelan nationals—a law school classmate asked me: Why isn’t every one of these raids—where officers trash property and terrorize residents—a potential Bivens case?

The answer, chilling, at least to me, is: Because my team and I spent decades at the Department of Justice making sure that such lawsuits would be dismissed, typically without trial, and often even without discovery.

For half a century, Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents has been hailed as the primary safeguard against unconstitutional actions by federal officers. Bivens permitted victims of these actions to seek money damages from individual federal officers directly under the Constitution. These actions are often analogized to the far more common “Section 1983” claims available against state and local officials under the Civil Rights Act of 1871. But accountability under Bivens is far more constrained than many lawyers might assume. Certainly, if you ask the general public whether they think there is a way to file a civil suit and receive compensation—whether from individual officers or the United States more broadly—for constitutional violations such as excessive or deadly force by federal actors, the general belief is: of course. Yet constitutional violations hardly ever result in the payment of damages. The reality is the behemoth that was Bivens now no longer serves victims of constitutional harms, the federal workforce as a whole, individual officers in particular, or society at large. Those in the United States must look somewhere else for recompense, deterrence, settled litigation expectations, and institutional and jurisprudential order.

Here’s why.

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