Isn’t there the possibility that the officer could be sued in a common law court for acting unlawfully with the color of law?

Lawsuits against federal employees are subject to the Bivens doctrine. Named after the landmark 1971 Supreme Court case Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, the ruling allowed a man to sue the federal agents who conducted a warrantless raid on his home and then strip-searched him at a courthouse.

But the Supreme Court has made it almost cartoonishly difficult for plaintiffs to make use of what was a very good decision. In 2017, the Court ruled in Ziglar v. Abbasi that Bivens claims against federal agents can survive only if they pass a two-pronged test. Step one: Does the claim arise in a "new context"—in other words, is it "different in a meaningful way from previous Bivens cases decided by" the Supreme Court? Unless a complaint mirrors the original facts of Bivens almost identically, or the facts of the small handful of cases that were allowed to proceed in times past, then the answer is "yes." Step two: Are there any "special factors counselling hesitation"—that is, reasons the judiciary should think twice about creating a new damages remedy against federal agents? The answer in the courts to the latter question, it seems, is also essentially always "yes."