“Federal officers do not have absolute immunity for actions taken on the job but they do have some immunities,” said Bryna Godar, a staff attorney at the State Democracy Research Initiative at the University of Wisconsin Law School.
The idea behind the concept of immunity for federal officers is to prevent a situation where states could grind the federal government to a halt by commonly arresting its agents, Godar said, but the protection is not absolute if the facts of the case support that the officer was acting unreasonably.