The Supreme Court released a few decisions this week. All of them are important for the parties involved, and ultimately for everyone, but not to the immediate degree that some of the other pending cases are (like the tariffs case). But one of the decisions is worth calling out, not for the decision itself, but for what Justice Gorsuch said in his concurrence and how it bears on electronic surveillance and the crisis we find ourselves in where the Fourth Amendment (along with the rest of the Constitution) is providing none of its promised protection.
The decision at issue is Case v. Montana where a unanimous Court agreed that the Fourth Amendment did not actually apply. The justices agreed that earlier precedent still held: it will not violate the Fourth Amendment for police officers to enter a home without a warrant if they have an “objectively reasonable basis for believing” that someone inside needs emergency assistance. It is a rule that on its face does not necessarily look unreasonable. The problem, though, is that, over time, courts have found more and more rules describing circumstances when it is ok to supersede the Fourth Amendment’s own clear rule that the people should be “secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects” from warrantless searches and seizures. As a result, over time the public has gotten less and less secure as fewer and fewer warrants have been needed by the government.
In his concurrence Justice Gorsuch agreed with the specific holding—that this sort of emergency rule exists, even in the shadow of the Fourth Amendment, and that it applied in this case—but he took some time ruminate on why it is a reasonable exception to the Fourth Amendment’s usual warrant requirement.
Does the Fourth Amendment tolerate this limited emergency aid exception to the warrant requirement just because five or more Justices of this Court happen to believe that such entries are “reasonable”? Or is this exception more directly “tied to the law”? Carpenter v. United States, 585 U. S. 296, 397 (2018) (GORSUCH , J., dissenting). The answer, I believe, is the latter.
The reason it is “tied to the law,” he explains, is because such an “emergency” rule would have been recognized in common law, and that rule would forgive anyone’s trespass for the purpose of giving aid, including the police’s:
Today’s decision echoes both the common-law emergency aid rule and its limitations. It does so, to be sure, in the context of a law enforcement officer, not a private citizen, who sought to enter another’s home. But on this point as well the common law has spoken, long providing that officers generally enjoy the same legal privileges as private citizens. See, e.g., Entick v. Carrington, 19 How. St. Tr. 1029, 1066 (C. P. 1765); 1 J. Chitty, Criminal Law 36 (1819); 2 M. Hale, Historia Placitorum Coronae 91 (1736). And, reflecting the common law here again, this Court has held that the Fourth Amendment usually permits officers lacking a valid warrant to “take actions that any private citizen might do without fear of liability.” Caniglia v. Strom, 593 U. S. 194, 198 (2021) (internal quotation marks omitted).
The emergency of course does not give them carte blanche, however. Police excused from needing a warrant to respond to an emergency “normally may do ‘no more’ than that.”
Contrary to Mr. Case’s argument, King v. Coate, Lofft. 73, 98 Eng. Rep. 539 (K. B. 1772), does not establish that the common law demanded an exacting showing of actual necessity to defeat a claim for trespass. True, Lord Mansfield explained that any necessity defense in that case would need to “stand the strictest test,” with the “necessity manifestly proved.” Id., at 75, 98 Eng. Rep., at 540. But Coate involved an effort to involuntarily “confin[e] a person in a madhouse” for two months, not a claim over a home entry. Id., at 74, 98 Eng. Rep., at 539. And it is hardly surprising that the common law would demand a good deal more to justify a serious deprivation of liberty than to excuse an invasion of property rights aimed at protecting human safety.
But what is most interesting about Gorsuch’s analysis is not how he applied the common law rule here but his larger argument that it is common law rules that should be applied to the Fourth Amendment analysis generally and not the line of precedent that has resulted since the Court decided Katz v. US in 1967. Those subsequent decisions have instead emphasized that whether there was a “reasonable expectation of privacy” is key to determining whether the Fourth Amendment has been violated. So while Katz itself had the immediate effect of expanding the protective reach of the Fourth Amendment, as Gorsuch had earlier complained in his dissent in the Carpenter v. US case, it set subsequent precedent down a path that largely narrowed it. As he wrote then:
Katz has yielded an often unpredictable—and sometimes unbelievable—jurisprudence. Smith and Miller are only two examples; there are many others. Take Florida v. Riley, 488 U.S. 445, 109 S.Ct. 693, 102 L.Ed.2d 835 (1989), which says that a police helicopter hovering 400 feet above a person’s property invades no reasonable expectation of privacy. Try that one out on your neighbors. Or California v. Greenwood, 486 U.S. 35, 108 S.Ct. 1625, 100 L.Ed.2d 30 (1988), which holds that a person has no reasonable expectation of privacy in the garbage he puts out for collection. In that case, the Court said that the homeowners forfeited their privacy interests because “[i]t is common knowledge that plastic garbage bags left on or at the side of a public street are readily accessible to animals, children, scavengers, snoops, and other members of the public.” Id., at 40, 108 S.Ct. 1625 (footnotes omitted). But the habits of raccoons don’t prove much about the habits of the country. I doubt, too, that most people spotting a neighbor rummaging through their garbage would think they lacked reasonable grounds to confront the rummager. Making the decision all the stranger, California state law expressly protected a homeowner’s property rights in discarded trash. Id., at 43, 108 S.Ct. 1625. Yet rather than defer to that as evidence of the people’s habits and reasonable expectations of privacy, the Court substituted its own curious judgment.
Even in a case like Carpenter, which the government basically lost, Gorsuch still had dissented from the decision apparently because he felt the rationale was so poisoned by the post-Katz reasoning that had subsequently emerged in so many cases since. As he wrote then:
In the end, what do Smith and Miller add up to? A doubtful application of Katz that lets the government search almost whatever it wants whenever it wants. The Sixth Circuit had to follow that rule and faithfully did just that, but it’s not clear why we should.
One unfortunate way that Fourth Amendment protection has been narrowed since Katz is in the context of electronic surveillance. In case after case it has been an uphill battle to challenge programs that give the government so much information about people’s lives. Indeed, as Gorsuch had earlier worried in Carpenter, as long as the rule excusing an intrusion into what the Fourth Amendment would protect hinges on whether it invades a “reasonable expectation of privacy,” then there is effectively no protection to be had, because it simply isn’t a durable standard. As his comment in this recent case about the “five or more Justices of this Court” harkened back to, it is subjectively dependent on the whims of the judges hearing the case. As he also wrote then:
Maybe, then, the Katz test should be conceived as a normative question. But if that’s the case, why (again) do judges, rather than legislators, get to determine whether society should be prepared to recognize an expectation of privacy as legitimate? Deciding what privacy interests should be recognized often calls for a pure policy choice, many times between incommensurable goods—between the value of privacy in a particular setting and society’s interest in combating crime. Answering questions like that calls for the exercise of raw political will belonging to legislatures, not the legal judgment proper to courts. See The Federalist No. 78, p. 465 (C. Rossiter ed. 1961) (A. Hamilton). When judges abandon legal judgment for political will we not only risk decisions where “reasonable expectations of privacy” come to bear “an uncanny resemblance to those expectations of privacy” shared by Members of this Court. Minnesota v. Carter, 525 U.S. 83, 97, 119 S.Ct. 469, 142 L.Ed.2d 373 (1998) (Scalia, J., concurring).
The case this week was not an electronic surveillance case. But it is worth noting that Gorsuch is still holding fast to his insistence that the common law is still the correct lens to use to evaluate potential Fourth Amendment violations, and not the “reasonable expectation of privacy” lens that has emerged since Katz.
It should come as no surprise that our decision today might accord with the accumulated learning of the common law—just as it should come as no surprise that our application of the Fourth Amendment ought to be informed by the common law’s lessons rather than mere intuition.
Because even if building off of Katz can sometimes result in even more protection, too often it has resulted in less, despite the Fourth Amendment’s articulated protection and history.
For a period, to be sure, the miasma created by this Court’s Katz era led some to think the scope of the rights guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment depend on nothing more than current judicial instincts about “reasonable expectations of privacy.” See Carpenter, 585 U. S., at 394–395, 405–406 (GORSUCH , J., dissenting). But that confusion cannot last forever, for no one should think the rights of Americans hang on so thin a thread. Instead, and as Justice Story recognized, the Fourth Amendment is made of sturdier stuff, representing “the affirmance of a great constitutional doctrine of the common law.” 3 Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States 748 (1833).
But his concurrence here may be more than just academic; it seems like it could be read to suggest that it may be time for litigants to take another swing at challenging the government’s warrantless electronic surveillance, especially given his callback to Carpenter, a case that implicated it. Because this time, he is intimating, the Court should get the analysis right, to find such surveillance anathema under the Fourth Amendment, by using more timeless common law principles than the courts since Katz have been free to use. Because even if the lower courts have been stuck with the “reasonable expectation of privacy” framework, the Supreme Court is not. And this concurrence reads as a clear call for the Court to revisit it.
Such challenges would also come not a moment too soon (assuming they are not already too late) given how the government’s data collection practices are now having immediate, direct, and horrific effect on people’s liberty writ large. It is not just personal information currently being seized but actual people, aided by the warrantless collection of their data. Or, in other words, and as it seems Gorsuch understands, what is happening is exactly what the Fourth Amendment was supposed to forestall. Thus it seems time for litigants to try again, to tee up before the Supreme Court the Fourth Amendment question that electronic surveillance implicates so that the Court can back up and try again, this time directing our subsequent Fourth Amendment jurisprudence down a different path from where it strayed post-Katz, and instead lead to one where the rights of Americans, particularly with respect to their electronic data, no longer “hang on so thin a thread.” It seems there’s already at least one justice on board with finding that the Fourth Amendment precludes what the government has been doing of late, and probably more.
Postscript: It is not the point of this post, but it is worth spending a moment to also digest Justice Sotomayor’s concurrence. In it she cautions that this decision should not be taken as a blanket rule that a police officer can always rush in without a warrant when they anticipate an emergency situation. Indeed, she notes, rushing in has the tendency to create the emergency, especially given the proliferation of firearms, and that danger should count heavily on the side of the ledger against the warrantless intrusion. Nevertheless, she continued, as in this case there can be factors counterbalancing those concerns and nevertheless justify the intrusion, which is why she joined the decision. But she was careful to emphasize in her concurrence that the rule here is not that all warrantless entrances in case of emergency are allowed; rather, the rule is that an assessment of whether there is an “objectively reasonable basis” for entering needs to always be made before such a warrantless intrusion can potentially be excused.
That conclusion, on the facts of this case, does not mean it will always be objectively reasonable for officers responding to a mental-health crisis to make a warrantless entry. A different mix of information [in this case here] might have led to the conclusion that the officers’ entry itself would put the occupant (and officers) at a greater risk of escalation and serious injury. Because the “objectively reasonable basis” test, as reaffirmed by the Court today, demands careful attention to the case-specific risks that attend mental-health crises, and requires officers to act reasonably in response, I join the Court’s opinion in full.
Ever since Trump took office and turned over immigration enforcement to someone who killed pets more often than she’s experienced moments of joy, the world has been shrinking. It America vs. everyone else at this point, with the Trump administration adding hefty amounts of imperialism to its heady blend of white Christian fascism.
To be non-white is to be less than 2/3rds of a human, which is something I thought we might have moved past during the last 100 years or so. But everything old is new again, especially the stuff that should just be the relics of a shameful history, rather than the latest thing getting gilded by the administration’s ex-Fox News turd polishers.
After an Afghan refugee shot some National Guard troops, Trump and his DHS placed an indefinite pause on immigration applications from a total of 19 countries, including (of course) Afghanistan, a country we hastily exited and turned over to the Taliban.
For no discernible reason, another 20 countries have been added to the immigration ban. Unsurprisingly, none of these countries are mostly white. Here’s NPR with the details on the administration’s latest burst of xenophobia:
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, or USCIS, in a memo released Thursday, said it would pause the review of all pending applications for visas, green cards, citizenship or asylum from immigrants from the additional countries. The memo also outlines plans to re-review applications of immigrants from these countries as far back as 2021.
The list, which is composed mostly of countries in Africa, includes Angola, Nigeria, Senegal, Tanzania and Zimbabwe.
Wow. Imagine that. There’s a pattern developing here, and it’s exactly what you think it is. Here’s the full list of countries whose residents are subject to an indefinite ban on immigration applications:
Afghanistan, Angola, Antigua and Barbuda, Benin, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Chad, Congo, Cuba, Dominica, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Gabon, Haiti, Iran, Ivory Coast, Laos, Libya, Malawi, Mali, Mauritania, Myanmar, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, Tanzania, The Gambia, Togo, Tonga, Turkmenistan, Venezuela, Yemen, Zambia, and Zimbabwe
Here’s what that looks like:
So, we’ve got more than half of Africa on the blocklist. It will never reach 100% because South Africa is home to some pretty feisty white colonials the president seems to personally appreciate despite (or because of) their white nationalist leanings.
Give it a few more months and the rest of that continent should be colored in. And while this government will pretend this is about national security and/or thwarting the international drug trade, it’s safe to assume any national security threat posed by autocrats Trump likes (Putin, Bukele, Orban, Erdogan) will be ignored to keep them, um, whitelisted. And any other nation that poses no threat one way or another but happens to be heavily populated by people with more skin pigmentation will find their immigration privileges suspended until at least January 2029.
We’re no longer part of the free world. We’re a nation that’s hastily and deliberately backsliding into the worst version of itself, thanks to the irrational hatred of those in power. We may not have forgotten our history, but we’re being ruled by people who want to doom us to repeat it.
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We all know that the US can be hypocritical, but this all seems a bit over the top.
Here’s what actually happened: the UK’s communications regulator Ofcom opened an investigation into whether X violated the country’s Online Safety Act by allowing Grok to create and distribute non-consensual intimate images (NCII). This isn’t some theoretical concern—as I detailed last week, Grok has been churning out sexualized images at an alarming rate, with users publicly generating “undressing” content and worse, in many cases targeting real women and girls. UK Technology Secretary Liz Kendall told Parliament that Ofcom could impose fines up to £18 million or seek a court order to block X entirely if violations are found.
Enter Sarah B. Rogers, the Trump-appointed Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy, who decided this was the perfect moment to threaten a close US ally. In an interview with GB News, Rogers declared:
I would say from America’s perspective … nothing is off the table when it comes to free speech. Let’s wait and see what Ofcom does and we’ll see what America does in response.
She went further, accusing the British government of wanting “the ability to curate a public square, to suppress political viewpoints it dislikes” and claiming that X has “a political valence that the British government is antagonistic to.”
This is weapons-grade nonsense, and Rogers knows it.
The UK isn’t investigating X because they don’t like Elon Musk’s politics. They’re investigating because Grok is being used to create sexualized deepfakes of real people without consent, including minors. Unless Rogers is prepared to stand up and argue that generating non-consensual sexualized imagery of real people—including children—is somehow quintessential “conservative speech” that the US must defend, she’s deliberately mischaracterizing what’s happening here. Is that really the hill the State Department wants to die on? That deepfake NCII is conservative speech?
As UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s spokesperson put it:
“It’s about the generation of criminal imagery of children and women and girls that is not acceptable. We cannot stand by and let that continue. And that is why we’ve taken the action we have.”
But here’s where the hypocrisy becomes truly spectacular: just this week, the Republican-led Senate unanimously passed the DEFIANCE Act for the second time. This legislation would create a federal civil cause of action allowing victims of non-consensual deepfake intimate imagery to sue the producers of such content. No matter what you think of that particular bill (I have my concerns about the specifics of how the bill works), it’s quite something when you have the State Department’s mafioso-like threat being issued to the UK if they take any action to respond to what’s happening on X at the same time the MAGA-led US Senate is voting unanimously to move forward on a bill that could have a similar impact.
So let’s review the US government’s position:
Banning an entire social media platform because China might access data (that they can already buy from data brokers anyway)? Perfectly fine, rush it through SCOTUS.
Allowing victims to sue over non-consensual sexualized deepfakes? Great idea, unanimous Senate support.
Another country investigating whether a platform violated laws against generating sexualized deepfakes of minors? UNACCEPTABLE CENSORSHIP, NOTHING IS OFF THE TABLE.
The MAGA mindset in a nutshell: performative nonsense when it fits within a certain bucket (in this case the “OMG Europeans censoring Elon”) no matter that it conflicts with stated beliefs elsewhere.
It’s important to consider all of this in light of the whole TikTok ban fiasco. When the Supreme Court blessed Congress’s decision to ban an app based on vague national security concerns—concerns so urgent that the Biden administration immediately decided not to enforce the ban after winning in court and which Trump has continued to not enforce for an entire year—America effectively torched its moral authority to criticize other countries for restricting platforms.
As I wrote when that ruling came down, we essentially said it’s okay to create a Great Firewall of America. We told the world that if you claim “national security” loudly enough, with sufficient “bipartisan support,” you can ban whatever app you want, First Amendment concerns be damned. Chinese officials have pointed to the US’s TikTok ban to justify their own internet restrictions, and now we’re handing authoritarian regimes another gift: the US will threaten retaliation if you try to enforce laws against platforms generating sexualized imagery of children.
When you blow up the principle that countries shouldn’t ban apps based on content concerns, you don’t get to suddenly rediscover those principles when it’s your billionaire’s app on the chopping block.
And make no mistake about what Rogers is really defending here. Grok continues to generate sexualized content at scale. Elon Musk continues running X like an edgelord teenager who knows he’s rich enough to avoid consequences, and women—especially young women—continue facing harassment and abuse via these tools.
The State Department’s threats aren’t about defending free speech. They’re about protecting Musk’s business interests. It’s about maintaining the double standard that got us here: American companies can do whatever they want globally, but foreign companies operating in America face existential threats for far less.
The UK is investigating potential violations of laws against generating sexualized imagery of minors and non-consenting adults. If the State Department thinks that’s “censorship,” they should explain why the Senate just voted unanimously to let victims sue over exactly that conduct.
Look, the UK’s investigation may or may not lead anywhere. Ofcom may find violations, or it may not. They may impose fines, or they may not. They may seek to block X, or they may not. But the one thing the US government absolutely cannot do with a straight face is threaten them for even considering it.
You don’t get to ban TikTok and then act outraged when other countries contemplate similar actions against American companies. You don’t get to pass unanimous legislation allowing lawsuits over deepfake NCII while your State Department calls investigations into that same deepfake NCII “censorship.” You don’t get to spend years claiming that national security justifies any restriction on platforms and then suddenly discover that “free speech” means other countries can’t enforce their laws.
There are no principles here, only sheer abuse of power. And Sarah Rogers’s threat to the UK makes that abundantly clear: the rules we claimed justified banning TikTok apparently only apply when we’re the ones doing the banning.
Last year we noted repeatedly how the Trump administration and Larry Ellison (owner of CBS) would be joining forces to try and stop Netflix’s $82.7 billion acquisition of Warner Brothers. Larry, if you’re not aware, is attempting to buy up what’s left of America’s soggy-ass corporate media (and TikTok) to create a propaganda safe space for America’s increasingly unhinged and anti-democratic extraction class.
Warner Brothers rejected Ellison’s higher $108 billion offer for Netflix, citing Saudi money involvement and dodgy financial math as something that might make approval more difficult. When that failed, Ellison attempted a hostile takeover attempt with the help of the president’s son in law and the Saudis. When that didn’t work, Ellison tried to sue Warner Brothers.
With that going nowhere, Ellison has clearly turned to right wing propaganda to help portray the Netflix acquisition as somehow “woke” and dangerous:
The President has also taken to his personal right wing propaganda social media company to cry about woke Netflix (which had the audacity to air a military TV show featuring gay people that made right wing zealots cry not that long ago):
While Netflix’s acquisition of Warner Brothers likely won’t be great for labor, creatives, or consumers (and Netflix will be eager to debase itself further to get regulatory approval), letting Larry Ellison and his nepobaby son turn the remnants of U.S. corporate media into yet another right wing propaganda empire is arguably a far worse outcome for a country already on the brink of collapse.
When this lazy “woke Netflix” campaign fails, I suspect the Trump DOJ will ultimately launch a bogus antitrust inquiry into the Netflix Warner Brothers merger. This campaign will highlight all manner of real and manufactured horrible impacts of the Netflix deal, ignoring the fact that letting one of the nation’s richest right wing extremists own most of U.S. media would be decidedly worse.
Something of note: Netflix has made it clear it only wants the Warner Brothers studio assets. It doesn’t want the sagging-ratings albatrosses that are CNN or the Discovery TV networks. So even if the Netflix deal somehow survives DOJ challenge, it’s still likely those spun-off assets are acquired by Ellison anyway, at which point he’ll be sure to do the same thing to them he’s currently doing to CBS. Just without the money making IP (DC Comics, Harry Potter, etc.) Warner Brothers owns as a backstop.
Which would still result in a more powerful Larry Ellison agitprop empire, but one slightly more likely to collapse from mismanagement. These are all bad outcomes, but some (authoritarian dominance of the entirety of media of the kind we’ve seen in Orban’s Hungary) are decidedly worse than others. Competent Dem strategists or fans of Democracy looking to help need to make stopping that the top priority, since the ideal outcome (blocking all of these deals) simply isn’t realistically on the table.
Meet the new year, same as the old year, at least as far as America’s measles problem goes. We talked a lot about this disease last year, and for good reason. In RFK Jr.’s first year as Secretary of HHS, America managed to suffer its worst measles infection count since 1991. A direct product of the anti-vaxxer bullshit Kennedy and his followers have been pushing for years, America collected 2,144 confirmed cases of measles in 2025. That number is certainly an under-count, with who knows how many undiagnosed cases existing out there. Three people, including two otherwise healthy children, died. America is all but certain to have lost its elimination status of the disease. Of all the gravel-mouthed words that spilled out of Kennedy’s mouth in 2025, there were relatively few of them reserved for this highly contagious and deadly disease that is now circulating via various outbreaks in the country who’s health he’s in charge of managing.
The start of 2026 is likely to set us up for an even worse year for measles than the last. Over 5% of the total infections of measles in 2025 were reported in the last week of the year or so. It’s not slowing down. This disaster of a train may be still pulling out of the station, but it’s picking up speed. And while the CDC’s measles website, linked above, isn’t updated more than once a week at most, health officials are reporting a ton of infections in the ongoing South Carolina outbreak alone.
In a regularly scheduled update this afternoon, the health department said 99 cases were identified since Tuesday, bringing the outbreak total to 310 cases. There are currently 200 people in quarantine and nine in isolation. However, the outbreak is expanding so quickly and with so many exposure sites that health officials are struggling to trace cases and identify people at risk.
“An increasing number of public exposure sites are being identified with likely hundreds more people exposed who are not aware they should be in quarantine if they are not immune to measles,” Linda Bell, state epidemiologist and the health department’s incident commander for the measles outbreak, said in the announcement. “Previous measles transmission studies have shown that one measles case can result in up to 20 new infections among unvaccinated contacts.”
It’s not just the unvaccinated any longer. As 2025 went on, we began to see an uptick in what are called “breakthrough cases.” Health professionals who know what they’re talking about will tell you that 2 doses of the MMR vaccine are roughly 97% effective in preventing a measles infection. That leaves 3% of people exposed at a minimum and that’s before we get into the discussion of how that number is impacted the lower we get from the 95% immunization target to achieve true herd immunity. And if you followed the reported infection statistics throughout last year as I did, you saw the percentage of infections occurring among those that had gotten either 1 or 2 doses of the MMR vaccine increase.
At the end of the year, 3% of the infected had had one dose of the MMR vaccine, and 4% had two doses. Early in the year, those were hovering between 1% and 2% and then grew. Responsible people who protected not only themselves but their fellow citizens by doing the right thing and getting their shots were put at risk and infected by those who didn’t. This failure of civil responsibility once again went largely unchallenged by RFK Jr. because of some combination of lunacy and his own financial interests.
And the real fun hasn’t even begun yet. Measles is crazy infectious and likes to hide its contagious nature early in the infection, not to mention that the disease causes immunity amnesia for all kinds of other diseases, making those infected susceptible to all kinds of diseases despite inoculation, such as chickenpox and COVID19.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which only has data as of January 6, has tallied three confirmed cases for this year (two in South Carolina and one in North Carolina, linked to the South Carolina outbreak). Since then, South Carolina reported 26 cases on Tuesday and 99 today, totaling 125. North Carolina also reported three additional cases Tuesday, again linked to the South Carolina outbreak. In all, that brings the US tally to at least 131 just nine days into the year.
Do the math. Even if we pretend for a moment that infectious diseases like measles don’t work on an exponential schedule, we’re already on pace for well over 5,000 measles infections this year. Unless something is done, it will be many, many more cases than that. And a possible resurgence of COVID19, something to which I really did think Trump would be particularly allergic.
Unfortunately, rationality appears to have gone out of style. Replaced, I suppose, by a facial rash that then descends into further complications.
This story was originally published by ProPublica.Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0license. The original version has even more horrifying photographs and videos of agents engaging in this kind of behavior.
Immigration agents have put civilians’ lives at risk using more than their guns.
An agent in Houston put a teenage citizen into a chokehold, wrapping his arm around the boy’s neck, choking him so hard that his neck had red welts hours later. A black-masked agent in Los Angeles pressed his knee into a woman’s neck while she was handcuffed; she then appeared to pass out. An agent in Massachusetts jabbed his finger and thumb into the neck and arteries of a young father who refused to be separated from his wife and 1-year-old daughter. The man’s eyes rolled back in his head and he started convulsing.
After George Floyd’s murder by a police officer six years ago in Minneapolis — less than a mile from where an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot and killed Renee Good last week — police departments and federal agencies banned chokeholds and other moves that can restrict breathing or blood flow.
But those tactics are back, now at the hands of agents conducting President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign.
Examples are scattered across social media. ProPublica found more than 40 cases over the past year of immigration agents using these life-threatening maneuvers on immigrants, citizens and protesters. The agents are usually masked, their identities secret. The government won’t say if any of them have been punished.
In nearly 20 cases, agents appeared to use chokeholds and other neck restraints that the Department of Homeland Security prohibits “unless deadly force is authorized.”
About two dozen videos show officers kneeling on people’s necks or backs or keeping them face down on the ground while already handcuffed. Such tactics are not prohibited outright but are often discouraged, including by federal trainers, in part because using them for a prolonged time risks asphyxiation.
We reviewed footage with a panel of eight former police officers and law enforcement experts. They were appalled.
This is what bad policing looks like, they said. And it puts everyone at risk.
“I arrested dozens upon dozens of drug traffickers, human smugglers, child molesters — some of them will resist,” said Eric Balliet, who spent more than two decades working at Homeland Security Investigations and Border Patrol, including in the first Trump administration. “I don’t remember putting anybody in a chokehold. Period.”
“If this was one of my officers, he or she would be facing discipline,” said Gil Kerlikowske, a longtime police chief in Seattle who also served as Customs and Border Protection commissioner under President Barack Obama. “You have these guys running around in fatigues, with masks, with ‘Police’ on their uniform,” but they aren’t acting like professional police.
Over the past week, the conduct of agents has come under intense scrutiny after an ICE officer in Minneapolis killed Good, a mother of three. The next day, a Border Patrol agent in Portland, Oregon, shot a man and woman in a hospital parking lot.
Top administration officials rushed to defend the officers. Speaking about the agent who shot Good, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem said, “This is an experienced officer who followed his training.”
Officials said the same thing to us after we showed them footage of officers using prohibited chokeholds. Federal agents have “followed their training to use the least amount of force necessary,” department spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said.
“Officers act heroically to enforce the law and protect American communities,” White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said.
Both DHS and the White House lauded the “utmost professionalism” of their agents.
Our compilation of incidents is far from complete. Just as the government does not count how often it detains citizens or smashes through vehicle windows during immigration arrests, it does not publicly track how many times agents have choked civilians or otherwise inhibited their breathing or blood flow. We gathered cases by searching legal filings, social media posts and local press reports in English and Spanish.
Given the lack of any count over time, it’s impossible to know for certain how agents’ current use of the banned and dangerous tactics compares with earlier periods.
But former immigration officials told us they rarely heard of such incidents during their long tenures. They also recalled little pushback when DHS formally banned chokeholds and other tactics in 2023; it was merely codifying the norm.
That norm has now been broken.
One of the citizens whom agents put in a chokehold was 16 years old.
Tenth grader Arnoldo Bazan and his father were getting McDonald’s before school when their car was pulled over by unmarked vehicles. Masked immigration agents started banging on their windows. As Arnoldo’s undocumented father, Arnulfo Bazan Carrillo, drove off, the terrified teenager began filming on his phone. The video shows the agents repeatedly ramming the Bazans’ car during a slow chase through the city.
Bazan Carrillo eventually parked and ran into a restaurant supply store. When Arnoldo saw agents taking his father violently to the ground, Arnoldo went inside too, yelling at the agents to stop.
One agent put Arnoldo in a chokehold while another pressed a knee into his father’s neck. “I was going to school!” the boy pleaded. He said later that when he told the agent he was a citizen and a minor, the agent didn’t stop.
“I started screaming with everything I had, because I couldn’t even breathe,” Arnoldo told ProPublica, showing where the agent’s hands had closed around his throat. “I felt like I was going to pass out and die.”
DHS’ McLaughlin accused Arnoldo’s dad of ramming his car “into a federal law enforcement vehicle,” but he was never charged for that, and the videos we reviewed do not support this claim. Our examination of his criminal history — separate from any immigration violations — found only that Bazan Carrillo pleaded guilty a decade ago to misdemeanor driving while intoxicated.
McLaughlin also said the younger Bazan elbowed an officer in the face as he was detained, which the teen denies. She said that Arnoldo was taken into custody to confirm his identity and make sure he didn’t have any weapons. McLaughlin did not answer whether the agent’s conduct was justified.
Experts who reviewed video of the Bazans’ arrests could make no sense of the agents’ actions.
“Why are you in the middle of a store trying to grab somebody?” said Marc Brown, a former police officer turned instructor who taught ICE and Border Patrol officers at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Centers. “Your arm underneath the neck, like a choking motion? No! The knee on the neck? Absolutely not.”
DHS revamped its training curriculum after George Floyd’s murder to underscore those tactics were out of bounds, Brown said. “DHS specifically was very big on no choking,” he said. “We don’t teach that. They were, like, hardcore against it. They didn’t want to see anything with the word ‘choke.’”
After agents used another banned neck restraint — a carotid hold — a man started convulsing and passed out.
In early November, ICE agents in Fitchburg, Massachusetts, stopped a young father, Carlos Sebastian Zapata Rivera, as he drove with his family. They had come for his undocumented wife, whom they targeted after she was charged with assault for allegedly stabbing a co-worker in the hand with scissors.
Body camera footage from the local police, obtained by ProPublica, captured much of what happened. The couple’s 1-year-old daughter began crying. Agents surrounded the car, looking in through open doors.
According to the footage, an agent told Zapata Rivera that if his wife wouldn’t come out, they would have to arrest him, too — and their daughter would be sent into the foster system. The agent recounted the conversation to a local cop: “Technically, I can arrest both of you,” he said. “If you no longer have a child, because the child is now in state custody, you’re both gonna be arrested. Do you want to give your child to the state?”
Zapata Rivera, who has a pending asylum claim, clung to his family. His wife kept saying she wouldn’t go anywhere without her daughter, whom she said was still breastfeeding. Zapata Rivera wouldn’t let go of either of them.
Federal agents seemed conflicted on how to proceed. “I refuse to have us videotaped throwing someone to the ground while they have a child in their hands,” one ICE agent told a police officer at the scene.
But after more than an hour, agents held down Zapata Rivera’s arms. One, who Zapata Rivera’s lawyer says wore a baseball cap reading “Ne Quis Effugiat” — Latin for “So That None Will Escape” — pressed his thumbs into the arteries on Zapata Rivera’s neck. The young man then appeared to pass out as bystanders screamed.
The technique is known as a carotid restraint. The two carotid arteries carry 70% of the brain’s blood flow; block them, and a person can quickly lose consciousness. The tactic can cause strokes, seizures, brain damage — and death.
“Even milliseconds or seconds of interrupted blood flow to the brain can have serious consequences,” Dr. Altaf Saadi, a neurologist and associate professor at Harvard Medical School, told us. Saadi said she couldn’t comment on specific cases, “but there is no amount of training or method of applying pressure on the neck that is foolproof in terms of avoiding neurologic damage.”
In a bystander video of Zapata Rivera’s arrest, his eyes roll back in his head and he suffers an apparent seizure, convulsing so violently that his daughter, seated in his lap, shakes with him.
“Carotid restraints are prohibited unless deadly force is authorized,” DHS’ use-of-force policy states. Deadly force is authorized only when an officer believes there’s an “imminent threat of death or serious bodily injury” and there is “no alternative.”
In a social media post after the incident and in its statement to ProPublica, DHS did not cite a deadly threat. Instead, it referenced the charges against Zapata Rivera’s wife and suggested he had only pretended to have a medical crisis while refusing help from paramedics. “Imagine FAKING a seizure to help a criminal escape justice,” the post said.
“These statements were lies,” Zapata Rivera alleges in an ongoing civil rights lawsuit he filed against the ICE agent who used the carotid restraint. His lawyer told ProPublica that Zapata Rivera was disoriented after regaining consciousness; the lawsuit says he was denied medical attention. (Representatives for Zapata Rivera declined our requests for an interview with him. His wife has been released on bond, and her assault case awaits trial.)
A police report and bodycam footage from Fitchburg officers at the scene, obtained via a public records request, back up Zapata Rivera’s account of being denied assistance. “He’s fine,” an agent told paramedics, according to footage. The police report says Zapata Rivera wanted medical attention but “agents continued without stopping.”
Saadi, the Harvard neurologist, said that as a general matter, determining whether someone had a seizure is “not something even neurologists can do accurately just by looking at it.”
DHS policy bars using chokeholds and carotid restraints just because someone is resisting arrest. Agents are doing it anyway.
When DHS issued restrictions on chokeholds and carotid restraints, it stated that the moves “must not be used as a means to control non-compliant subjects or persons resisting arrest.” Deadly force “shall not be used solely to prevent the escape of a fleeing subject.”
But videos reviewed by ProPublica show that agents have been using these restraints to do just that.
In Los Angeles in June, masked officers from ICE, Border Patrol and other federal agencies pepper-sprayed and then tackled another citizen, Luis Hipolito. As Hipolito struggled to get away, one of the agents put him in a chokehold. Another pointed a Taser at bystanders filming.
Then Hipolito’s body began to convulse — a possible seizure. An onlooker warned the agents, “You gonna let him die.”
When officers make a mistake in the heat of the moment, said Danny Murphy, a former deputy commissioner of the Baltimore Police Department, they need to “correct it as quickly as possible.”
That didn’t happen in Hipolito’s case. The footage shows the immigration agent not only wrapping his arm around Hipolito’s neck as he takes him down but also sticking with the chokehold after Hipolito is pinned on the ground.
The agent’s actions are “dangerous and unreasonable,” Murphy said.
Asked about the case, McLaughlin, the DHS spokesperson, said that Hipolito was arrested for assaulting an ICE officer. Hipolito’s lawyers did not respond to ProPublica’s requests for comment.
According to the Los Angeles Times, Hipolito limped into court days after the incident. Another citizen who was with him the day of the incident was also charged, but her case was dropped. Hipolito pleaded not guilty and goes to trial in February.
Some of the conduct in the footage isn’t banned — but it’s discouraged and dangerous.
Placing a knee on a prone subject’s neck or weight on their back isn’t banned under DHS’ use-of-force policy, but it can be dangerous — and the longer it goes on, the higher the risk that the person won’t be able to breathe.
“You really don’t want to spend that amount of time just trying to get somebody handcuffed,” said Kerlikowske, the former CPB commissioner, of the video of the arrest in Portland.
Brown, the former federal instructor and now a lead police trainer at the University of South Carolina, echoed that. “Once you get them handcuffed, you get them up, get them out of there,” he said. “If they’re saying they can’t breathe, hurry up.”
Taking a person down to the ground and restraining them there can be an appropriate way to get them in handcuffs, said Seth Stoughton, a former police officer turned law professor who also works at the University of South Carolina. But officers have long known to make it quick. By the mid-1990s, the federal government was advising officers against keeping people prolongedly in a prone position.
When a federal agent kneeled on the neck of an intensive care nurse in August, she said she understood the danger she was in and tried to scream.
“I knew that the amount of pressure being placed on the back of my neck could definitely hurt me,” said Amanda Trebach, a citizen and activist who was arrested in Los Angeles while monitoring immigration agents. “I was having a hard time breathing because my chest was on the ground.”
McLaughlin, the DHS spokesperson, said Trebach impeded agents’ vehicles and struck them with her signs and fists.
Trebach denies this. She was released without any charges.
“No, no!” one bystander exclaims. “He’s not doing anything!”
DHS’ McLaughlin did not respond to questions about the incident.
Along with two similarchoking incidents at protests outside of ICE facilities, this is one of the few videos in which the run-up to the violence is clear. And the experts were aghast.
“Without anything I could see as even remotely a deadly force threat, he immediately goes for the throat,” said Ashley Heiberger, a retired police captain from Pennsylvania who frequently testifies in use-of-force cases. Balliet, the former immigration official, said the agent turned the scene into a “pissing contest” that was “explicitly out of control.”
“It’s so clearly excessive and ridiculous,” Murphy said. “That’s the kind of action which should get you fired.”
“How big a threat did you think he was?” Brown said, noting that the officer slung his rifle around his back before grabbing and body-slamming the protester. “You can’t go grab someone just because they say, ‘F the police.’”
In November, Border Patrol agents rushed into the construction site of a future Panda Express in Charlotte, North Carolina, to check workers’ papers. When one man tried to run, an officer put him in a chokehold and later marched him out, bloodied, to a waiting SUV.
Freelance photographer Ryan Murphy, who had been following Border Patrol’s convoys around Charlotte, documented the Panda Express arrest.
“Their tactics are less sophisticated than you would think,” he told ProPublica. “They sort of drive along the streets, and if they see somebody who looks to them like they could potentially be undocumented, they pull over.”
Experts told ProPublica that if officers are targeting a specific individual, they can minimize risks by deciding when, where and how to take them into custody. But when they don’t know their target in advance, chaos — and abuse — can follow.
“They are encountering people they don’t know anything about,” said Scott Shuchart, a former assistant director at ICE.
“The stuff that I’ve been seeing in the videos,” Kerlikowske said, “has been just ragtag, random.”
There may be other factors, too, our experts said, including quotas and a lack of consequences amid gutted oversight. With officers wearing masks, Shuchart said, “even if they punch grandma in the face, they won’t be identified.”
As they sweep into American cities, immigration officers are unconstrained — and, the experts said, unprepared. Even well-trained officers may not be trained for the environments where they now operate. Patrolling a little-populated border region takes one set of skills. Working in urban areas, where citizens — and protesters — abound, takes another.
DHS and Bovino did not respond to questions about their agents’ preparation or about the chokehold in Charlotte.
Experts may think there’s abuse. But holding officers to account? That’s another matter.
Back in Houston, immigration officers dropped 16-year-old Arnoldo off at the doorstep of his family home a few hours after the arrest. His neck was bruised, and his new shirt was shredded. Videos taken by his older sisters show the soccer star struggling to speak through sobs.
Uncertain what exactly had happened to him, his sister Maria Bazan took him to Texas Children’s Hospital, where staff identified signs of the chokehold and moved him to the trauma unit. Hospital records show he was given morphine for pain and that doctors ordered a dozen CT scans and X-rays, including of his neck, spine and head.
From the hospital, Maria called the Houston Police Department and tried to file a report, the family said. After several unsuccessful attempts, she took Arnoldo to the department in person, where she says officers were skeptical of the account and their own ability to investigate federal agents.
Arnoldo had filmed much of the incident, but agents had taken his phone. He used Find My to locate the phone — at a vending machine for used electronics miles away, close to an ICE detention center. The footage, which ProPublica has reviewed, backed the family’s account of the chase.
The family says Houston police still haven’t interviewed them. A department spokesperson told ProPublica it was not investigating the case, referring questions to DHS. But the police have also not released bodycam footage and case files aside from a top sheet, citing an open investigation.
“We can’t do anything,” Maria said one officer told her. “What can HPD do to federal agents?”
Elsewhere in the country, some officials are trying to hold federal immigration officers to account.
In California, the state Legislature passed bills prohibiting immigration officers from wearing masks and requiring them to display identification during operations.
In Illinois, Gov. JB Pritzker signed a law that allows residents to sue any officer who violates state or federal constitutional rights. (The Trump administration quickly filed legal challenges against California and Illinois, claiming their new laws are unconstitutional.)
In Minnesota, state and local leaders are collecting evidence in Renee Good’s killing even as the federal government cut the state out of its investigation.
Arnoldo is still waiting for Houston authorities to help him, still terrified that a masked agent will come first. Amid soccer practice and making up schoolwork he missed while recovering, he watches and rewatches the videos from that day. The car chase, the chokehold, his own screams at the officers to leave his dad alone. His father in the driver’s seat, calmly handing Arnoldo his wallet and phone while stopping mid-chase for red lights.
The Bazan family said agents threatened to charge Arnoldo if his dad didn’t agree to be deported. DHS spokesperson McLaughlin did not respond when asked about the alleged threat. Arnoldo’s dad is now in Mexico.
Asked why an officer choked Arnoldo, McLaughlin pointed to the boy’s alleged assault with his elbow, adding, “The federal law enforcement officer graciously chose not to press charges.”
How We Did It
ProPublica journalists Nicole Foy, McKenzie Funk, Joanna Shan, Haley Clark and Cengiz Yar gathered videos via Spanish and English social media posts, local press reports and court records. We then sent a selection of these videos to eight police experts and former immigration officials, along with as much information as we could gather about the lead-up to and context of each incident. The experts analyzed the videos with us, explaining when and how officers used dangerous tactics that appeared to go against their training or that have been banned under the Department of Homeland Security’s use-of-force policy.
We also tried to contact every person we could identify being choked or kneeled on. In some cases, we also reached out to bystanders.
Research reporter Mariam Elba conducted criminal record searches of every person we featured in this story. She also attempted to fact-check the allegations that DHS made about the civilians and their arrests. Our findings are not comprehensive because there is no universal criminal record database.
We also sent every video cited in this story to the White House, DHS, CBP, ICE, border czar Tom Homan and Border Patrol’s Gregory Bovino. DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin provided a statement responding to some of the incidents we found but she did not explain why agents used banned tactics or whether any of the agents have been disciplined for doing so.
There are many different agencies under U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that deal with immigration, as well as non-immigration related agencies such as Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). ICE is specifically the enforcement arm of the U.S. immigration apparatus. Their stated mission is to “[p]rotect America through criminal investigations and enforcing immigration laws to preserve national security and public safety.”
While the NSA and FBI might be the first agencies that come to mind when thinking about surveillance in the U.S., ICE should not be discounted. ICE has always engaged in surveillance and intelligence-gathering as part of their mission. A 2022 report by Georgetown Law’s Center for Privacy and Technology found the following:
ICE had scanned the driver’s license photos of 1 in 3 adults.
ICE had access to the driver’s license data of 3 in 4 adults.
ICE was tracking the movements of drivers in cities home to 3 in 4 adults.
ICE could locate 3 in 4 adults through their utility records.
ICE built its surveillance dragnet by tapping data from private companies and state and local bureaucracies.
ICE spent approximately $2.8 billion between 2008 and 2021 on new surveillance, data collection and data-sharing programs.
With a budget for 2025 that is 10 times the size of the agency’s total surveillance spending over the last 13 years, ICE is going on a shopping spree, creating one of the largest, most comprehensive domestic surveillance machines in history.
How We Got Here
The entire surveillance industry has been allowed to grow and flourish under both Democratic and Republican regimes. For example, President Obama dramatically expanded ICE from its more limited origins, while at the same time narrowing its focus to undocumented people accused of crimes. Under the first and second Trump administrations, ICE ramped up its operations significantly, increasing raids in major cities far from the southern border and casting a much wider net on potential targets. ICE has most recently expanded its partnerships with sheriffs across the U.S., and deported more than 1.5 million people cumulatively under the Trump administrations (600,000 of those were just during the first year of Trump’s second term according to DHS statistics), not including the 1.6 million people DHS claims have “self-deported.” More horrifying is that in just the last year of the current administration, 4,250 people detained by ICE havegonemissing, and 31 have died in custody or while being detained. In contrast, 24 people died in ICE custody during the entirety of the Biden administration.
ICE also has openly stated that they plan to spy on the American public, looking for any signs of left-wing dissent against their domestic military-like presence. Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons said in a recent interview that his agency “was dedicated to the mission of going after” Antifa and left-wing gun clubs.
On a long enough timeline, any surveillance tool you build will eventually be used by people you don’t like for reasons that you disagree with. A surveillance-industrial complex and a democratic society are fundamentally incompatible, regardless of your political party.
EFF recently published a guide to using government databases to dig up homeland security spending and compiled our own dataset of companies selling tech to DHS components. In 2025, ICE entered new contracts with several private companies for location surveillance, social media surveillance, face surveillance, spyware, and phone surveillance. Let’s dig into each.
Phone Surveillance Tools
One common surveillance tactic of immigration officials is to get physical access to a person’s phone, either while the person is detained at a border crossing, or while they are under arrest. ICE renewed an $11 million contract with a company called Cellebrite, which helps ICE unlock phones and then can take a complete image of all the data on the phone, including apps, location history, photos, notes, call records, text messages, and even Signal and WhatsApp messages. ICE also signed a $3 million contract with Cellebrite’s main competitor Magnet Forensics, makers of the Graykey device for unlocking phones. DHS has had contracts with Cellebrite since 2008, but the number of phones they search has risen dramatically each year, reaching a new high of 14,899 devices searched by ICE’s sister agency U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) between April and June of 2025.
If ICE can’t get physical access to your phone, that won’t stop them from trying to gain access to your data. They have also resumed a $2 million contract with the spyware manufacturer, Paragon. Paragon makes the Graphite spyware, which made headlines in 2025 for being found on the phones of several dozen members of Italian civil society. Graphite is able to harvest messages from multiple different encrypted chat apps such as Signal and WhatsApp without the user ever knowing.
Our concern with ICE buying this software is the likelihood that it will be used against undocumented people and immigrants who are here legally, as well as U.S. citizens who have spoken up against ICE or who work with immigrant communities. Malware such as Graphite can be used to read encrypted messages as they are sent, other forms of spyware can also download files, photos, location history, record phone calls, and even discretely turn on your microphone to record you.
How to Protect Yourself
The most effective way to protect yourself from smartphone surveillance would be to not have a phone. But that’s not realistic advice in modern society. Fortunately, for most people there are other ways you can make it harder for ICE to spy on your digital life.
The first and easiest step is to keep your phone up to date. Installing security updates makes it harder to use malware against you and makes it less likely for Cellebrite to break into your phone. Likewise, both iPhone (Lockdown Mode) and Android (Advanced Protection) offer special modes that lock your phone down and can help protect against some malware.
Having your phone’s software up to date and locked with a strong alphanumeric password will offer some protection against Cellebrite, depending on your model of phone. However, the strongest protection is simply to keep your phone turned off, which puts it in “before first unlock” mode and has been typically harder for law enforcement to bypass. This is good to do if you are at a protest and expect to be arrested, if you are crossing a border, or if you are expecting to encounter ICE. Keeping your phone on airplane mode should be enough to protect against cell-site simulators, but turning your phone off will offer extra protection against cell-site simulators and Cellebrite devices. If you aren’t able to turn your phone off, it’s a good idea to at least turn off face/fingerprint unlock to make it harder for police to force you to unlock your phone. While EFF continues to fight to strengthen our legal protections against compelling people to decrypt their devices, there is currently less protection against compelled face and fingerprint unlocking than there is against compelled password disclosure.
Internet Surveillance
ICE has also spent $5 million to acquire at least two location and social media surveillance tools: Webloc and Tangles, from a company called Pen Link, an established player in the open source intelligence space. Webloc gathers the locations of millions of phones by gathering data from mobile data brokers and linking it together with other information about users. Tangles is a social media surveillance tool which combines web scraping with access to social media application programming interfaces. These tools are able to build a dossier on anyone who has a public social media account. Tangles is able to link together a person’s posting history, posts, and comments containing keywords, location history, tags, social graph, and photos with those of their friends and family. Penlink then sells this information to law enforcement, allowing law enforcement to avoid the need for a warrant. This means ICE can look up historic and current locations of many people all across the U.S. without ever having to get a warrant.
ICE also has established contracts with other social media scanning and AI analysis companies, such as a $4.2 million contract with a company called Fivecast for the social media surveillance and AI analysis tool ONYX. According to Fivecast, ONYX can conduct “automated, continuous and targeted collection of multimedia data” from all major “news streams, search engines, social media, marketplaces, the dark web, etc.” ONYX can build what it calls “digital footprints” from biographical data and curated datasets spanning numerous platforms, and “track shifts in sentiment and emotion” and identify the level of risk associated with an individual.
Another contract is with ShadowDragon for their product Social Net, which is able to monitor publicly available data from over 200 websites. In an acquisition document from 2022, ICE confirmed that ShadowDragon allowed the agency to search “100+ social networking sites,” noting that “[p]ersistent access to Facebook and Twitter provided by ShadowDragon SocialNet is of the utmost importance as they are the most prominent social media platforms.”
For U.S. citizens, making your account private on social media is a good place to start. You might also consider having accounts under a pseudonym, or deleting your social media accounts altogether. For more information, check out our guide to protecting yourself on social media. Unfortunately, people immigrating to the U.S. might be subject to greater scrutiny, including mandatory social media checks, and should consult with an immigration attorney before taking any action. For people traveling to the U.S., new rules will soon likely require them to reveal five years of social media history and 10 years of past email addresses to immigration officials.
ICE has acquired trucks equipped with cell-site simulators (AKA Stingrays) from a company called TechOps Specialty Vehicles (likely the cell-site simulators were manufactured by another company). This is not the first time ICE has bought this technology. According to documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union, ICE deployed cell-site simulators at least 466 times between 2017 and 2019, and ICE more than 1,885 times between 2013 and 2017, according to documents obtained by BuzzFeed News. Cell-site simulators can be used to track down a specific person in real time, with more granularity than a phone company or tools like Webloc can provide, though Webloc has the distinct advantage of being used without a warrant and not requiring agents to be in the vicinity of the person being tracked.
How to protect yourself
Taking public transit or bicycling is a great way to keep yourself off ALPR databases, but an even better way is to go to your local city council meetings and demand the city cancels contracts with ALPR companies, like people have done in Flagstaff, Arizona; Eugene, Oregon; and Denver, Colorado, among others.
If you are at a protest, putting your phone on airplane mode could help protect you from cell-site simulators and from apps on your phone disclosing your location, but might leave you vulnerable to advanced targeted attacks. For more advanced protection, turning your phone completely off protects against all radio based attacks, and also makes it harder for tools like Cellebrite to break into your phone as discussed above. But each individual will need to weigh their need for security from advanced radio based attacks against their need to document potential abuses through photo or video. For more information about protecting yourself at a protest, head over to SSD.
Last but not least, ICE uses tools to combine and search all this data along with the data on Americans they have acquired from private companies, the IRS, TSA, and other government databases.
To search all this data, ICE uses ImmigrationOS, a system that came from a $30-million contract with Palantir. What Palantir does is hard to explain, even for people who work there, but essentially they are plumbers. Palantir makes it so that ICE has all the data they have acquired in one place so it’s easy to search through. Palantir links data from different databases, like IRS data, immigration records, and private databases, and enables ICE to view all of this data about a specific person in one place.
The true civil liberties nightmare of Palantir is that they enable governments to link data that should have never been linked. There are good civil liberties reasons why IRS data was never linked with immigration data and was never linked with social media data, but Palantir breaks those firewalls. Palantir has labeled themselves as a progressive, human rights centric company historically, but their recent actions have given them away as just another tech company enabling surveillance nightmares.
Threat Modeling When ICE Is Your Adversary
Understanding the capabilities and limits of ICE and how to threat model helps you and your community fight back, remain powerful, and protect yourself.
One of the most important things you can do is to not spread rumors and misinformation. Rumors like “ICE has malware so now everyone’s phones are compromised” or “Palantir knows what you are doing all the time” or “Signal is broken” don’t help your community. It’s more useful to spread facts, ways to protect yourself, and ways to fight back. For information about how to create a security plan for yourself or your community, and other tips to protect yourself, read our Surveillance Self-Defense guides.
We need to have a hard look at the surveillance industry. It is a key enabler of vast and untold violations of human rights and civil liberties, and it continues to be used by aspiring autocrats to threaten our very democracy. As long as it exists, the surveillance industry, and the data it generates, will be an irresistible tool for anti-democratic forces.
Weiss is, according to a new New York Times article, not enjoying all the criticism and, like any good leader, blaming her subordinates for the problems she’s causing:
“Privately, Ms. Weiss has been deeply frustrated by the negative reaction to her decisions, and has blamed some subordinates for not stanching the criticism, three people familiar with internal discussions said.”
The “entertaining” bit is that Weiss doesn’t appear to be good at either journalism (because she’s barely done any) or agitprop (arguably the whole reason the Ellison family hired her). That’s causing some weird frictions, including this bit in the Times article where Weiss insists she doesn’t want CBS to report the news, she wants it to “be” the news:
“The goal for this road show is not to deliver the news so much as it is to *drive the news*,” Ms. Weiss wrote in a note obtained by The New York Times. “We need to *be the news* for these 10 days.”
That is an intentional misrepresentation of journalism’s function by somebody who wants to be an effective engagement troll that chases virality, but clearly doesn’t really know how to go about it at this sort of scale. Weiss built a weird little contrarian trolling blog, but that’s a completely different animal from creating a mass media propaganda machine. Just ask Roger Aisles.
I think, like many in the extraction-class funded engagement trolling industry, Weiss has deluded herself into genuinely believing she’s helpingfix journalism. But again, that’s not what the weird mishmash of 80s ski comedy villains at Ellison’s Paramount want. And I suspect that if Weiss doesn’t start doing a better job of lying to the electorate in a more exciting and ratings-grabbing way pretty soon, she’ll be replaced by a much bigger asshole (and more effective culture war troll) before the summer arrives.
