REVEALED: The Scope of ICE’s Surveillance of Its Online Critics
INSIDE: Markwayne Mullin ... Todd Blanche ... Jeanine Pirro
ICE’s Round-the-Clock Digital Dragnet
About a month ago, it emerged from upstate New York that the Department of Homeland Security was targeting online critics of ICE by trying to force them to sign a heretofore unheard of “Warning Notice” admitting that their criticisms were unlawful.
Now the Wall Street Journal reports that those cases are just the tip of the iceberg of a larger DHS surveillance program targeting social media users nationwide. As with the previously reported cases, the ICE Office of Professional Responsibility is taking the lead — a dramatic departure from its previous role as internal affairs bureau investigating wrongdoing by ICE agents.
DHS has used, with varying degrees of success, administrative subpoenas and grand jury subpoenas to unmask social media posters, according to the new report.
There are, of course, some actually concerning threats online — and some subsequent convictions — but the scope of DHS surveillance program seems to go well beyond true threats. The WSJ attempts to put some numbers to it (emphases added):
“To unmask anonymous online critics, DHS has sent hundreds of subpoenas to social-media companies, according to people familiar with the matter. Its agents have tracked down Americans at work and on the road, asking them to sign letters acknowledging their online speech about ICE ‘may’ be a crime.”
“The notice for OPR’s new threat initiative calls for the monitoring of nearly 20 social sites, including Reddit, Discord, Snapchat and LinkedIn, and the use of public documents such as DMV records and police reports to identify and map key relationships of users who have been flagged as a ‘threat originator.’”
“OPR has investigated at least 131 incidents of doxxing and threats towards agency personnel between January 2025 and March of this year, according to a court declaration …”
“DHS sent administrative subpoenas to Reddit for the information of 11 accounts that had posted ‘content critical of federal actions.’ … Reddit determined that these users were engaged in protected activity under the First Amendment and objected to each, the person said, and DHS eventually withdrew the requests.”
“The Wall Street Journal identified 10 people—nine Americans and one Canadian—who pushed back against DHS’s attempts to unmask them through the two types of subpoenas. Of those, judges have upheld four grand jury subpoenas. No charges have yet been filed in these cases. The agency abandoned three cases, while three more are pending.”
Funding is another tell.
A WSJ analysis found that ICE spending on surveillance technology and consultants surged by 57% year over year to $258 million during Trump’s first full year back in office.
Lawyers told the newspaper that the spike in subpoenas for information on online critics began to spike in September, which coincided with when a new $8 million contract took effect between OPR and a software development firm called Amivero, which subcontracted the work to the global consulting firm Guidehouse.
Both of the previously reported upstate New York cases are apparently products of OPR’s new surveillance program. As Morning Memo noted last month, one of the targets in those two cases, David Streever, filed a lawsuit in D.C. with help from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression alleging that ICE’s OPR violated his First Amendment rights when it went to his home in June and then tracked him down while he was traveling to issue him a “Warning Notice” for a non-threatening but critical email opposing Operation Metro Surge that he sent to then-acting ICE Director Todd M. Lyons.
Streever refused to sign the “Warning Notice.”
Mass Deportation Watch
Ohio: With their Temporary Protected Status withdrawn, Haitians immigrants are being outfitted with ankle monitors by DHS, the WaPo reports.
New York: U.S. District Judge Mae A. D’Agostino of Albany struck down the state’s law banning federal officers from wearing masks as a violation of the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause.
D.C.: Democratic officials from 24 states and D.C. sued to block DHS from viewing personal details about millions of people receiving anti-poverty aid, Politico reports.
Senate Judiciary to Vote on Blanche
After a few days of delay, Todd Blanche’s nomination as attorney general looks likely to make it through the Senate Judiciary Committee today, which will stand for all time as a ratification by Senate Republicans of President Trump’s evisceration of the Justice Department and of Blanche’s lawless award of IRS immunity to Trump personally.
One more footnote on the IRS immunity, via the NYT: While the retroactive immunity is limited to the parties to Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS — himself, his sons Don Jr. and Eric, and the Trump Organization — the lawsuit defines the Trump Organization as the Trump Organization, LLC, and 418 other entities that are not specifically identified. Let that sink in.
More Reflecting Pool Cases Dropped
D.C. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro, whose job is in jeopardy for dismissing the highest profile of the bogus Reflecting Pool “vandalism” cases, has also moved to dismiss three other similar cases related to the peeling liner from what she now admits was a “hasty and botched” renovation job.
MAGA’s Crony Capitalism Comes With A Socialist Twist
The Trump administration has now taken ownership stakes in at least 30 corporations, according to the libertarian CATO Institute, which is closely tracking the new practice:
What is remarkable is that federal corporate ownership is becoming routine under a Republican administration, while a Republican-controlled Congress is not just letting it happen but may even enshrine the practice in statute.
Republicans warning that communists are taking over the Democratic Party might first ask why their own administration is so eager to have the government acquire pieces of private companies.
As CATO notes, the Biden administration awarded funds to private companies under the same CHIPS and Science Act provisions that the Trump administration is using but without taking equity interests in the companies.
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Ethereal Phenomenon
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Fine, I’ll call it now while hoping I’m wrong: Dissident will be criminalized by the end of the year, definitely by the end of 2027.
By that I mean less by statute than by dissidents getting dragged through the criminal justice system.
Obviously, there’d be a chilling effect, but the other thing, maybe a bigger thing, is making our POTUS happy to act like the bully he is at his core.
And, of course, the Democrats, will do far too little to matter… Maybe their criticism of Trump and his party needs to be a little stronger, maybe even fact- and reality-based…