Trump’s Secret Police Harass Citizens for Reporting ICE Activity and Criticizing His Immigration Policy
HSI has issued a record number of field subpoenas (i.e. administrative warrants with zero judicial oversight) to Alphabet and Meta, under Trump, for identifying information about critics of ICE and the Trump admin including a senior who wrote a benign email to a federal prosecutor pleading for mercy on behalf of an Afghan refugee facing deportation. In the latter case, HSI got enough information to locate the man and actually showed up at his door, two weeks after he sent the email, and interrogated him for 20 minutes about a completely legal first amendment protected activity. The same instrument was used to identify and target international students for deportation last year, for the heinous thought crime of participating in a pro-Palestinian protest and many times to identify and target people who exercise their first amendment right to film and report law enforcement actions which includes ICE and CBP.
Trump and his sycophants have given us several signs that they don’t believe the first amendment applies to their detractors from Bondi’s podcast statement that she would target people for “hate speech”, to ICE Barbie’s conflation of filming ICE agents with violence, to Pirro’s dubious criminal probe into the No Kings protest organizers, to their boss’s repeated demands that news networks that deride him have their non-existent broadcast licenses revoked and his legal sanctions against law firms that sued him in his personal capacity and his admin on behalf of detained migrants (EOs 14230, 14246, & 14250) has made it pretty clear that calling them fascists is not hyperbolic this time around.