DHS Is Building Secret Databases of Anti-ICE Protesters, Pro-Palestinian Activists, and Other Dissenters to Target Them as 'Domestic Terrorists'

The Trump administration is obsessed with describing anyone who might oppose it as a “domestic terrorist”—which is pretty rich for the guys who staged Jan. 6 and then pardoned hundreds of people convicted of actual assaults on the Capitol police. There have been rumblings about the Department of Homeland Security forming a database of anti-ICE protesters to be targeted for retribution. Now we have confirmation that these enemies lists are real.

Ken Klippenstein has the scoop:

We have a nice little database and now you’re considered a domestic terrorist,” a masked federal agent taunted a protester filming him in Maine last week.

Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin’s response was firm: “There is NO database of ‘domestic terrorists’ run by DHS.”

There’s just one problem: She’s lying.

Two senior national security officials tell me that there are more than a dozen secret and obscure watchlists that homeland security and the FBI are using to track protesters (both anti-ICE and pro-Palestinian), “Antifa,” and others who are promiscuously labeled “domestic terrorists.” …

“One thing I’m pushing for right now … we’re going to create a database where those people that are arrested for interference, impeding and assault, we’re going to make them famous,” Tom Homan, Trump’s border czar, told Fox News earlier this month. …

Impeding federal law enforcement has emerged as the Trump administration’s primary justification for actions against people like Renee Good and Alex Pretti.

As part of its new effort to support its operations in places like Minneapolis and Los Angeles, the Homeland Security Department, working with the Justice Department, has started more methodically tracking what it calls “aggressive protesters.” According to one senior official, this is a new designation the agency uses to describe the supposed threat posed by people on the streets.

Both Good and Pretti were considered aggressive protesters; in Good’s case, for criticizing ICE officers while operating a vehicle; and in Pretti’s case, getting up close to immigration officers while filming them. …

The key issue is this: “Under the Privacy Act, Levinson-Waldman explains, the government is prohibited from collecting and retaining information about Americans exercising their First Amendment rights.”

The Trump administration is taking tangible steps toward making mere dissent into evidence of criminality.

The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.

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