More evidence is piling up that contradicts the almost-but-not-quite denials given by administration officials in response to allegations about the DHS compiling a database to keep tabs on protesters.
Just a few months ago, “Immigration Czar” Todd Lyons was trying to turn credible accusations into a nothingburger by deploying a few vague and trite statements that didn’t actually add up to real denial. Protesters were reporting that immigration officers were taking photos of protesters, trying to gather other identifying info from them when accosting them, and then doing truly nasty stuff plainly meant to deter them from engaging in further protests or simply trying to document what ICE officers were doing out in the field.
Protesters and observers who have encountered ICE officers have reported multiple drive-bys by ICE officers at their personal homes, calls from unidentified officers containing veiled threats of punishment, and other forms of intimidation that are reliant on having enough collected data to locate people’s homes, phone numbers, places of business, etc.
If this database of protesters and other ICE opponents doesn’t actually exist, it would seem unlikely that any immigration officer would refer to it. But that has happened and that’s what drew the questions from congressional reps that Lyons then attempted to dance around.
Rep. Lou Correa, D-Calif., cited a well-circulated clip of an ICE agent in Portland, Maine, telling a person videotaping that she would be added to a “nice little database.”
“I can’t speak for that individual,” said Todd Lyons, who serves as acting director of ICE. “But I can assure you that there is no database that’s tracking United States citizens.”
Lyons doubled down on his denials about the database’s existence during a Senate hearing Thursday. When asked if ICE is giving protester information to any other agency, Lyons said: “We do not.”
In his official response to congressional oversight, Lyons went a bit further… which only made things worse.
If individuals who interact with ICE officers are not arrested or detained, any information collected during those encounters is maintained consistent with applicable law and DHS and ICE policies and is treated as an official government record.
That’s the information-gathering side of things, which clearly states that ICE is collecting information on more than just the people it arrests. And since it’s collecting this information on non-arrestees in the normal course of business, the compilation is undeniably happening. Whether or not this information is segregated from the rest of the stuff ICE gathers is hardly consequential, which makes this statement from Lyons especially meaningless.
DHS is not creating or maintaining a separate, standalone database for individuals encountered that haven’t been arrested or detained.
You don’t have to create a new database. You don’t even have to silo it off. You can just dump this info in with the rest of the stuff and let those with access use this info to track down protesters in order to intimidate them.
A recent court filing in a lawsuit against the DHS brought by anti-ICE protesters in Maine (one that alleges a lot of truly troubling behavior by ICE officers) says ICE is shoving this info into Palantir’s gaping data maw, presumably to expedite future threats, intimidation, and retaliation against First Amendment-protected activity.
An explosive and newly partially unsealed court filing alleges that the US Department of Homeland Security built up dossiers on ICE observers—including their photos, license plate numbers, and other information—and stored them in a system called the Investigative Case Management database, which was built by Palantir.
[…]
Plaintiffs allege in the filing, which is heavily based on documents produced by the government and depositions of DHS agents, that agents had a practice of intimidating protesters and observers. They did this, the filing says, by doing drive-bys of the observers’ homes and, in the case of at least one observer, requiring that she be referred to secondary inspection any time she tries to cross the border until at least January 2027.
The allegations are only going to get more serious the further this case proceeds. The plaintiffs are still operating with limited information, but what little they have already suggests ICE officers routinely engage in retaliatory acts against protesters and observers. From the filing [PDF]:
While the case is still in its preliminary stage, with only limited discovery, the record demonstrates that agents routinely collect images of observers’ faces and license plates, and have created retaliatory investigative records about their protected activity. Agents also threatened multiple observers with being placed on watchlists, and have continued their practice of intimidating drive-bys: in June of this year, an agent led Plaintiff Hilton to the address on her driver’s license and conspicuously stopped in front of the house. Other Mainers have experienced the same. All Plaintiffs have experienced concrete harm and have been chilled in the exercise of their First Amendment rights: Williams and Pantos have stopped all observation activity entirely, and Hilton and Fagan have reduced their protected activity or taken other precautions while doing so.
Whatever guidelines ICE may have in place (if any) to prevent ICE officers from gathering info on protesters and observers clearly isn’t working. The filing mentions multiple times where ICE officers have directly told the people they’re accosting that they would be adding them to the ICM (ICE’s case management system) or, worse, a “domestic terrorism watchlist.”
These are credible allegations, especially since some of these threats from officers have been recorded. The plaintiff who’s allegedly now facing mandatory secondary inspection at all border crossings for the next six months lends a lot of credence to claims about being added to terrorism watchlists.
DHS’s denial is hardly worth noting.
A spokesperson for DHS calls the case “meritless” and says that “the underlying lawsuit is based on the lie that there is a database of ‘domestic terrorists’ run by DHS.”
All this says is that the DHS doesn’t “run” the “domestic terrorists” database. While that is true (the Terrorist Screening Dataset is overseen by the DOJ and “run” by the FBI), the Terrorist Screening Center is a multi-agency operation (including the DHS and its components) that “manages” (direct quote here) its operations. Furthermore, the DHS and its components are designated “nominators,” which means exactly what’s being denied by DHS spokespeople: officers do have the power to put people on “terrorist watchlists.”
Whether or not this lawsuit leads to more discovery, there’s no reason to give the DHS the benefit of a doubt while waiting for more information to roll in. It has already shown it’s willing to violate rights, ignore court orders, and pretend existing immigration laws don’t actually say what they say. The mass deportation machinery deployed by the Trump administration is in a state of constant acceleration. Anything that might reduce a bit of the friction — even if it’s clearly unconstitutional acts of intimidation — will be deployed until a court tells it to stop… and then for awhile after that, if recent history is any indication. And it’s all being aided by a company that’s collecting tens of millions of dollars to, basically, help ICE agents connect these dots faster.