DHS Orders ICE Agents to Build a Database of Americans Protesting Immigration Enforcement Operations In a Blatant Violation of the First Amendment

The Trump administration does not regard domestic dissent as legitimate, and it has been acting accordingly. It has tear-gassed peaceful protesters and followed and harassed observers of its immigrant enforcement surge in Minnesota. This is all part of a larger effort to use ICE to build a domestic surveillance state to track and target dissenters.

The New York Times offers an analysis:

The Department of Homeland Security has tried to criminalize journalism by characterizing reporting as doxxing and observing as impeding law enforcement, and its agents are now threatening and sometimes assaulting people who record them—an effort to secure, in addition to the state’s monopoly on violence, a monopoly on surveillance. This may be another reason so many immigration officers are masked while on duty: They know better than we do what it means to show one’s face. In Minneapolis and elsewhere, agents now carry tools of surveillance into the field, just as they do their guns. …

[W]hile it is a familiar warning from civil libertarians that surveillance tools introduced in one narrow context will quickly be deployed in other, more worrying ways, immigration agents appear already to have made that jump, turning their apps on citizens who aren’t doing anything illegal beyond expressing hostility to the vision of state power embraced by MAGA and embodied by its mostly masked immigration enforcement army. …

A memo from a Department of Homeland Security official reviewed by CNN and sent to agents dispatched to Minneapolis last month asked them to “capture all images, license plates, identifications and general information” on “agitators, protesters, etc. so we can capture it all in one consolidated form.” And the official reportedly provided such a form, called “intel collection.” Last month Tom Homan, the president’s border czar, bragged to Fox News about how he was pushing to “create a database where those people that are arrested for interference, impeding and assault—we’re going to make them famous.” …

… giving indiscriminate checkpoint-style power to every agent in the field, [David] Bier said, is “a total reshaping of law enforcement in the United States.” Instead of investigating a crime by identifying a suspect and then pursuing information about him or her, officers instead begin with someone they want to treat as a criminal and then use the technology to find a justification. “This is so far from any type of typical law enforcement activity that I can’t even think of a parallel,” he said. “It’s entirely backward, and it’s all enabled by this technology.”

“We’ve seen cases where agents show up at people’s houses. Sometimes they’re following them home. Sometimes they’re showing up another way,” said Nathan Freed Wessler of the A.C.L.U. “How did they figure out who that person is and where they live?”

This follows from the basic logic behind the Department of Homeland Security: an effort to turn the overseas War on Terror back toward America’s homeland. The Trump administration is taking that to its ultimate logical conclusion, treating internal dissent as terrorism to be tracked and forcibly disrupted.

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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