NATIONWIDE — The Trump administration is expanding Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s surveillance powers in ways that civil liberties advocates warn are now directly targeting American citizens who criticize or protest the agency, according to the Brennan Center.
The center reported that ICE “will use its supercharged spy capabilities to target people who oppose ICE’s actions, labeled as ‘domestic terrorists’ by the administration.” The Brennan Center also stated that those targeted “include anti-ICE protesters and anyone who allegedly funds them, all of them part of a supposed left-wing conspiracy to violently oppose the president’s agenda.”
In September, President Trump publicly urged law enforcement to focus on “ideologies that are supposedly motivating domestic terrorism,” including “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender,” as well as opposition to “foundational American principles (support for law enforcement and border control).” The memo also highlighted anti-ICE activities such as protests, according to the Brennan Center.
ICE Director Todd Lyns followed up, stating, “We are going to track the money. We are going to track these ringleaders.” The Brennan Center noted that “he went on to claim, without evidence, that many of the protesters in Chicago were professional agitators being brought in.” He also stated that ICE would begin using its Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) division, which typically “investigates transnational crimes such as drug trafficking and related money laundering, human smuggling, and customs violations.”
Though the Trump administration has claimed that assaults against ICE agents have increased, “the administration has not even provided any support for its oft-repeated claim,” said the Brennan Center. The center further stated that “rather than hold these officers accountable, the administration has pursued multiple cases against the victims of its agents’ violence, claiming that they are terrorists who assaulted, resisted, or impeded federal agents.”
The newly-expanded ability of ICE to surveil individuals comes at the cost of impeding the First Amendment right to free speech. ICE has adopted strategies that include social media monitoring technologies tracking records of protest activity. The agency recently signed a “multimillion-dollar contract for a social media monitoring platform called Zignal Labs that claims to ingest and analyze more than 8 billion posts a day. The agency is also paying millions to Penlink for monitoring tools that gather information from multiple sources, including social media platforms, the dark web, and databases of location data,” according to the Brennan Center.
The new contracts allegedly expand ICE’s ability to track locations. The Brennan Center states that “Penlink’s social media software can monitor which devices have been at a certain location and how often, and creates ‘day-in-the-life’ profiles of targets based on social media, location data, and any other online information.” This adds to the agency’s cellphone-tower simulator equipment, bolstered by an $800,000 delivery order in May.
ICE is also obtaining location information from the nationwide web of license plate readers. Researchers found “4,000 nation- and statewide lookups by local and state police done either at the behest of the federal government or as an ‘informal’ favor to federal law enforcement.”
ICE’s attempts to obtain sensitive information do not stop there. The agency has invested in multiple technologies that make personal data more accessible, including apps that scan license plates, HSI requests for surveillance drones, high-resolution AI facial recognition tools, and cell phone hacking contracts, including “a $2 million contract with Paragon Solutions. Although publicly available documents provide few details, the company sells a tool that can remotely hack into cellphones,” according to the Brennan Center.
Though the courts have ruled against many of these strategies, “there is no information on whether ICE intends to follow this rule when accessing phones remotely,” said the center.
With the rapid evolution of technology, the Brennan Center argues that expanding access to personal information undermines constitutional rights to privacy. Though the Supreme Court has ruled against many of the tactics ICE is using, new backdoor surveillance methods continue to emerge, leaving anyone who opposes the current administration vulnerable to harassment, spying and being labeled “anti-American.”
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