How ICE Keeps an Eye on Protestors

While much of the florid, fashy antics of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, has lingered long in the memory, there’s one thing the agency has been doing that’s largely flown under the radar—its efforts to surveil protesters using sophisticated tracking technologies. This represents a realization of warnings that privacy advocates have long expressed: the tools of the war on terror would be turned on Americans by an authoritarian. According to a recent report from Wired, during the unrest in Minneapolis last year, ICE utilized Reaper drones, Signal chat interceptions, financial tracking, license plate readers, and more to target activists.The report focuses on how over 100 Homeland Security Investigations, or HSI, agents were deployed to infiltrate and monitor community meetings, marches, and general strikes in Minnesota. This was approved under a Trump directive from September of last year titled National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, issued after the assassination of Charlie Kirk. But this surveillance operation also relies on programs that date back to the early days of the PATRIOT Act. This isn’t an isolated incident, either. Reporting suggests that ICE has been utilizing many of these surveillance tactics around the country, and there’s still much that is not known about these programs. Daniel Solove, a professor of intellectual property and technology law at George Washington University, tells The New Republic that he’s long expected these kinds of tools would eventually be used in the ways we are now seeing.“The chickens have come home to roost,” Solove says. “We have an authoritarian government with all these surveillance technologies and minimal-to-no limits on what it can do with them. The legal controls are very weak, and now they’re abusing it. This isn’t a surprise. This is a disaster foretold.”Solove says it’s still “outrageous” that it’s happening, but it’s not a shock to him. He says that warnings from privacy experts like himself have mostly “fallen on deaf ears among policymakers,” as they’ve chosen not to pass comprehensive privacy protections through Congress.“This is exactly the type of scenario we’ve been warning about,” says Matthew Guariglia, a senior policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “The government has a very long history of surveilling people based on their political beliefs. In this new era, it’s not a surprise that the agency with carte blanche to buy and hoard as much surveillance equipment as possible, and that answers directly to the president, is the one being deployed to spy on protesters.”Surveillance is “infrastructure,” Guariglia says, and whatever justification the government might give for buying all of these tools often isn’t the only thing they’ll use it for. They might argue it’s to fight crime or protect national security, but it can easily be turned against citizens practicing their First Amendment rights.“At some point there’s going to need to be a huge accounting of what data DHS has collected in the last few years and what it’s been used for,” Guariglia says. “That includes data taken about protesters, any database that exists and how they’ve been using facial recognition. It also includes data they’ve been getting from other branches of government.”The first Trump administration crossed a lot of lines and violated people’s rights, but it wasn’t known for deploying surveillance technologies at the scale we’re seeing today. The second Trump administration has far fewer guardrails and a clear focus on utilizing technology to help achieve its authoritarian aims.“I don’t want to underplay the first Trump administration. There were terrible abuses,” Solove says. “But this one is different. It goes much, much further.”It’s not just the government we need to worry about, Solove says. Private data brokers and other private interests are deeply entangled in ICE’s surveillance operation, and he says that if legislators are going to tackle this threat to privacy and civil rights, the private sector needs to be a major part of their focus.“A lot of the tools, data and techniques the government uses are supplied by the private sector. That’s where the government gets the data,” Solove says. “This is a partnership, or collusion, between the private sector and the government. You can’t stop it by looking only at the government side anymore.”Guariglia says that through the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill that passed last year, the Department of Homeland Security received roughly $170 billion in new funding. He says the department has so much money now that it can throw a lot of it toward “dangerous technologies.”“What concerns me most right now is the interoperability of all these different devices and the capacity to fuse all of that data,” Guariglia says. “It’s not just license plate readers tracking where you move. It’s license plate readers tracking where you move, superimposed with information police get from protests and with social media posts, all of it digested and analyzed by AI.”Both Solove and Guariglia expressed support for Congress passing a comprehensive data privacy bill to address many of these concerns. States can also act to protect the privacy rights of their residents. Guariglia says Congress additionally needs to regulate and investigate the private companies that are collecting so much of our data and working alongside the Trump administration. “If a company or the government is allowed to get away with a lot, they’re going to keep getting away with it, and they’re going to get worse,” Solove says. “They never get better, just like a serial killer. If you don’t stop them, they just get worse and worse.”