The Americans caught in ICE’s web of surveillance

beyond the news of the day to bring you one big story.

“Since President Trump took office last year, the number of immigration and customs enforcement”

officers has more than doubled, according to the Department of Homeland Security in January. Funding for ICE has skyrocketed. All of these new resources have been used to expand law enforcement activities targeting undocumented people across the country. But lawful residents and American citizens are also increasingly getting caught up in these operations.

One of those people is Ben, a Minneapolis resident who asked that we only use his first name

because he worries the federal government will retaliate against him. Mike can late January, Ben was observing ICE operations around the city. Something he had been doing for weeks at that point. Ben was on his way home when he received a message that immigration agents had been spotted nearby.

Ben and his wife Gabby decided to head to the location. There were a lot of observers around, people were coming out of their houses. I got out of the car, so I was like, you know, got to go film.

“And Ben and Gabby arrived, Ben stood at the side of the road and filmed the officers who”

had already gotten back inside their car. It looked like they were about to leave, but they stopped and got out of the car and that's when I got. Daddy slammed? Yeah.

It wasn't really a tackle.

It wasn't a body slam. It was a body slam. You picked you up and slammed you down. In the video of the incident, you can see a masked federal officer run it, Ben, and slam him to the ground.

Ben was detained and held in custody for three hours. Before officers released him, they fingerprinted him and took his photo. And then that's when the DNA happened.

“An officer approached Ben with something that looked like a Q-tip and used it to swab the”

inside of Ben's cheek to collect his saliva. It was super casual. And it was just like, OK, yes, we're going to take this now and I was like, OK. It all happened so fast, Ben didn't realize what was happening. A few days after getting tackled, Ben found out that the encounter had left him with three

cracked ribs. And beyond the physical toll, the incident had on his body, he's also wondering what ice is doing with his DNA information. The whole ordeal has left him with lasting psychological stress. I don't really have words for it, but it's just not something that should have ever happened.

When we come back, look at the growing web of tracking and surveillance by ice. And the citizens getting tangled up in it. This message comes from wise, the app for international people using money around the globe. You can send, spend, and receive an up to 40 currencies with only a few simple taps. Be smart, get wise, download the wise app today or visit wise.com.

Please and seize apply. Welcome back to the Sunday story. Today we're looking at the expanded role of immigration and customs enforcement or ice

across the country in President Trump's second term.

Joining us today is in PR's Meg Anderson and Cat Lawn Storef. Meg Cat, welcome to the podcast. Hey, thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. So we just heard the story of Ben, whose DNA was taken from him after he was arrested

by ice agents in Minneapolis. Meg, you were the one who spoke to Ben and you also live in Minneapolis and have been reporting on the recent ice search there. I have to ask, do you have any idea what happened to Ben's DNA or why they were collecting it?

You know, we don't know. And actually, when I reached out to the Department of Homeland Security, the agency that oversees ice, they didn't respond to questions about why they're collecting the DNA where it's going, how it's being used, we do know that in the past DNA collected by ice and also border patrol has gone into the FBI's policing database.

And I feel like I should note, you know, legally the federal government does have broad authority to take the DNA of people it's arrested and actually the DHS spokesperson that I spoke to told me that federal law actually requires federal law enforcement to collect DNA samples from anyone arrested or facing charges. But lawyers I spoke to said, that's worrisome, you know, in part because DNA is such a big

deal. It is much more invasive than a fingerprint and it can tell you all kinds of things about a person, right? Their ancestry, health conditions, they're predisposed to even personality traits. And it's not just limited to that one person.

Here's Aaron Murphy, she's a law professor at New York University.

DNA and their children's DNA and their children's children, I mean DNA is a fairly new science and until we kind of settle into it a little more and understand it better, I would say mass collection of genetic material by governments or frankly private parties is not something we want to be indulging. Murphy said she thinks the federal statute that allows DNA collection after an arrest

for pretty much any crime is overly broad. And there's some precedent for that opinion. The Supreme Court hasn't weighed in on this specific federal law, but about a decade ago they did rule on a case about a Maryland state law and said that taking DNA is constitutional when someone has been arrested for a serious crime.

And beyond that, there's also concern about these arrests themselves, the ones that, you know, we looked into in Minnesota and elsewhere.

“You know, what happens if your arrest itself isn't illegal arrest, right?”

If you were doing something protected, for example, by the first amendment, like peacefully

protesting, what happens to that DNA? So here's Stanford Law Professor Oren Kerr. The officer says, I think you've crossed the line, I'm going to arrest you. I think he threatened physical force, therefore under this law, I'm allowed to do the DNA test.

It turns out the officer was wrong, but the DNA test has been conducted and the information has been entered into the database. What then? So, it has been the only person this has happened to, definitely not. So we decided to publish a story about DNA collection after we found six people in Illinois,

Oregon and others in Minnesota who described similar occurrences in recent months, right? If ice taking, what appear to be a DNA sample after arresting them while they were protesting the Trump administration's immigration campaigns? We decided that that was enough for our audience, right, to know that this was happening.

“But since then, you know, I've had people reach out to me and tell me this has happened”

to them too. And I found even more examples in Illinois, California and more people in Minnesota too. So Kat, you were also reporting in Minneapolis during the recent ice surge. What other tactics did you hear about ice using against Americans when you were out there reporting?

Yeah, we spent time pouring over court records and interviewing people and collected dozens of stories of people who have been caught recently in this giant surveillance web that DHS and specifically ice has been spinning. And there were some patterns that started to emerge, specifically with protestors or legal observers during the federal surge in Minneapolis.

I'll give you an example, Aisha.

I talked to a woman there named Emily who asked to only be identified by her first name

because she fears retribution from the federal government. And she described an evening in late January. She was following a nice vehicle as a constitutional observer, much like Ben.

“That's an action protected by the first amendment.”

When it abruptly stopped, a masked federal agent leaned out the window of that vehicle, took a picture of her and her car and then yelled her name and recited her home address to her. She said it really shook her. Their message was not subtle, right?

They were, in effect, saying we see you, we can get to you whenever we want to. And it did scare me. And we said she has no idea how those ice officers pulled up her information so quickly. But we heard stories like this over and over again. Yeah, we talked to other people who were out in their cars.

It was like Emily had been, right, following observing ice officers and had those officers take it one step further and actually lead them to their own homes. One observer in Minneapolis will stand so told me he's had officers lead him back to his own home twice. Once he was with other people and kind of laughed it off, but he was when he's told me about

that second time. The other one was much scarier because it was me and there were three ice cars that surrounded me. And they led me back to my house. Just me alone and you know, I was frightened. I didn't know what's going to happen.

Another observer I spoke to named L. She didn't want to use her full name. Told me she has been led to her home and that immigration officers have her dresser by the name of her wife, who her car is registered under. Here she is. They would just get out their phones and then come and stand right in front of my car and

take pictures of me and take pictures of our license plate and they frequently would come up to my vehicle and pound on the glass. And this kind of thing hasn't just been happening in Minneapolis. There was an incident that went viral of a woman in Maine named Colleen Fegan who recorded an interaction she had with ice agents, where she was filming them, again, an action

protected by the first amendment.

And one of the agents pulled out his phone and started taking pictures of both her and her license plate. Yeah, why do you think I am from Asian dollars? Because we have a nice little database.

And now you're, yeah, you consider domestic terrorists, so we're video jumping you.

Asia, you can hear the agent there saying that ice has a, quote, nice little database and that Fegan is now, quote, considered a domestic terrorist. Okay.

“I think I might have heard of this, this video, yeah, it was pretty viral.”

Yeah. So, I mean, is there a database of, quote, unquote, domestic terrorists? So, DHS has denied the existence of a database multiple times. Congressman Lucaria, a Democrat from California, asked Kristi Nome about this. She's now the former DHS secretary.

He asked her about it during a hearing in the house earlier this year. One of your ice officers in Maine recently told it of an observer that they're creating a database.

No, we're creating a database.

And Todd Lyons, who's the acting director for ice, has also denied it in front of Congress. And DHS also denied it to us in a statement. We got from them. And we did ask DHS why agents are taking pictures of protesters, faces, or license plates. And they did not respond to that question when we asked them.

Instead, the agency said in a statement that DHS, quote, will not reveal law enforcement methods or tactics.

“You know, despite them denying it, it could be that these are semantics, right?”

Maybe a contractor has a database, maybe it's not technically a database. These are still things that we don't know. But it's a lot of these unknowns that make it that much more unsettling, right? That's something Nathan Westler, he's the deputy director of the speech privacy and technology project at the ACLU pointed out to us.

But he should have to wonder if they're merely being intimidated or actually being subjected to an invasive biometrics scan, that's really just incredibly corrosive in what is supposed to be a free and open society. OK, so what do we know about the tools that DHS is using? Yeah, so we know about some of the technology being used.

And a lot of that comes from reporting from our colleague, Jude Jaffee Block, who's wonderful. For instance, DHS has an app that uses facial recognition technology to identify people. They also have tools that use location data to identify people almost like a Google maps type of thing. They also aggregate data from other government databases to learn as much as they can about

the people they're looking for, things like home addresses. We know some of this because an ice agent described these tools under oath in a court case we found. And it's important to kind of recognize that the huge influx of federal funding to this agency has allowed the government to develop or buy a lot of this technology.

And the focus of this interview, of course, is on citizens, right, and how they're being affected. But these tools that we know about, we have a much clearer sense of how they're being used on immigrants. We don't yet know how much they're being used on citizens.

That's kind of what Nathan Wessler was getting at. So I would say, for citizens, it's more like clues, right, that point us towards these tools. They're taking photos. They know information about people quickly, like names and addresses, but we don't

we don't totally have a clear picture yet. So so far, you're talking about surveillance that's happening in real life, like on the streets of cities, people are, you know, observing, ice, and then there, you know, ice is reciting information back to them and seeming to know their personal information or even collecting DNA.

Yeah. What about online, you know, is ice looking at what people are like posting or talking about online or on social media? Oh, absolutely. We're seeing that play out a lot through a tool called an administrative subpoena,

which DHS is sending to tech companies like Google or Meta demanding personal information to unmask anonymous accounts. Administrative dependents can be issued by a federal agency like DHS without a judge or a grand jury. They've typically been used with tech companies in the past for investigations involving

serious offenses like child sexual abuse material. But lately, we've seen a big uptick and then being sent specifically about anonymous accounts

that are tracking ice activity or a critical of ice.

And to be clear, because of the first amendment, these subpoenas can't be purely about

“retaliating against speech the government doesn't like, right?”

People have a constitutional right to criticize the government and to do so without revealing their identity. The reason for these subpoenas, you know, for that constitutional reason, the subpoenas often lists something like officer safety as the reason why they're being sent to those companies.

But privacy and civil rights experts, we've talked to you, saved that they threaten free speech. We talked to Steve Loney, he's an attorney at the ACLU in Pennsylvania who has represented several people who have been subpoenaed in this way in recent months.

The pattern appears to be as soon as people become vocal critics of what's happening in immigration

“enforcement, they get an email that from their social media company that says the government”

has requested your data. Do you have any sense of how common this pattern is, like, how many people are getting these administrative subpoenas? Yeah, it's a good question. And the scale of this is still really unknown at this point.

The ACLU has helped a handful of people fight these administrative subpoenas in court, but DHS has backed down and withdrawn the subpoena every single time. But it's possible many more people got emails from companies like Meta letting them know that some kind of subpoena had been issued, but people might have missed it. I talked to one person.

His name is Sherman Austin. He lives in Long Beach, California. He runs an account called "stop ice." Net.

It posts a lot of post-critical advice.

He shared a post-beck in September that identified an ice agent who was operating in California. It identified this agent all through publicly available information, like a photo taken in public of the ice agent wearing his uniform with a name tag on it, stuff like that. And it was a dare to later that he got one of these emails from Meta saying that law enforcement had requested his information, and he didn't quite believe that email at first.

It was really a vague email.

“I thought it first, it's just like a scam or is this some kind of fishing thing going on?”

Yeah, a couple of email exchanges back and forth of Meta finally got a redacted copy of the subpoena that was sent from DHS. The reason given was quote "office or safety or doxing," which he said was surprising to him since the post-inquestion was all publicly available information. Sherman Austin did take that to court, and DHS did withdraw that subpoena, but like we heard

him say, the email was really vague, and it could be that a lot of people are just missing it. When we come back, are these new tactics targeting American residents in citizens legal? Welcome back to the Sunday story, we're talking to reporters, Meg Anderson, and Kat Lawn Storef about how the tactics of immigration and customs enforcement have evolved since

the start of Trump's second time.

So Kat and Meg, you've laid out all these ways, ice is increasing their tracking and surveillance capacities, DNA swabs, databases that use facial recognition technology, license plate scanners, and as we know, the government has engaged in surveillance of US residents and citizens in the past. You know, I'm thinking of the civil rights movement of the 60s or Muslim communities after

9/11, but this sort of surveillance isn't what we think of when it comes to ISIS mandate.

“So I have to ask the question, is all of this legal?”

Yeah, you know, you're totally right. I should do surveillance in this country, it's nothing new, it's also not new at DHS, right? That's part of the reason the department was created after 9/11. And when it comes to the surveillance we're talking about today, the short answer to whether

or not it's legal is basically like the courts are still figuring that out.

There are two constitutional amendments that come to mind the most. One is the fourth amendment that protects people against unreasonable searches and seizures. Here's or incur again the Stanford Law Professor. Traditionally, the fourth amendment has allowed the government to follow people in public to take pictures of people in public to track them out of the world.

And so automated license plate readers and sort of cameras in public that might have facial recognition software attached to them. The so far courts have generally said those are constitutional under the fourth amendment. But he said courts also do pay attention to technological advances and they pay attention to context, right?

So let's say for instance, law enforcement is using cameras or something to track people over time as they move around a city. And what courts are suggested is like, usually this is not a search, but maybe if there are a lot of cameras in the government can assemble a really careful picture of what someone's doing with their life.

At some point it gets intense enough that it becomes a constitutional search. And you know, that actually happened in a Supreme Court case in 2018 the court said that police need a warrant to obtain historical cell phone location information. And actually the court is set to hear another case about cell phone location data this year that will likely happen before June.

So you know, basically lawyers we spoke to said some of these tools help DHS access information that would cross those lines, right, that they would otherwise need a warrant for. But that is for the courts to decide. Other legal experts we spoke to brought up threats to the first amendment, like we've talked about.

That comes up in the case of those subpoenas and the online criticism generally the right

And there are lawsuits and states like Minnesota and Maine alleging that when ice officers lead people to their homes, things like that, that that amounts to intimidation and violates a protestors freedom of expression. You're Steve Looney again with the Pennsylvania ACLU.

The ability to criticize the government anonymously is baked into our first amendment rights.

So for some people the way that they choose to exercise their first amendment right and to do so without the fear of government retribution is to remain anonymous. So we're just now seeing a lot of these cases make it to the courts and then the courts are going to have to decide where the boundaries are around a lot of these laws.

“I mean, that's also something that we see happen with technology, right?”

All the time, this is a lot of new technology and a lot of it the law is playing catch up on. So what happens now, like where is all of this increased surveillance pushing us as a society? Yeah.

So I feel like in Minnesota, Kat and I both saw the sort of the like immediate effects of this

right. And what we saw in Minneapolis was the use of these tools or you know, the perceived use of these tools, right? Taking photos of people showing them, you know, they know where they live, et cetera. Those things really intimidated people and they very quickly created a lot of fear and

a lot of paranoia, I would say, you know, justified paranoia in the community, a lot of people felt really suffocated. Like they were unsafe to just be in their own city for a lot of people, you know, it felt very quickly like living in a police state.

Like they were always being watched and you know, that can have a kind of chilling effect.

If you think you might be surveilled or arrested and have your DNA taken or subpoenaed, you might be less likely to show up at a protest to observe federal law enforcement or post something critical online, again, all of those actions that are protected by the constitution. Yeah.

“And I think more broadly, Minneapolis was sort of a test case, right?”

Of what using these tactics and mass against citizens would look like, and it should be a clue moving forward for, you know, what we could expect in other places in the country. Yeah. Absolutely. One thing we've been documenting across the newsroom here is the pattern of escalation.

We've seen from city to city during these federal immigration operations under this administration, whether that's the scope or the increasingly aggressive tactics or the surveillance. Now we've seen all these examples of Minneapolis and other cities and can only assume that it will escalate when and where the next ice operation focuses. Well, Kat and Meg, thank you to you both for doing this important work being there on

the ground in Minnesota and letting us know what's going on. Thank you. Thanks for having us. Yeah, you're welcome. Thank you.

That was NPR's Meg Anderson and Kat Blondstorff. NPR's Jew Jaffee Block also contributed to this reporting. This episode of the Sunday Story was produced by Andrew Lombell. It was edited by Leanna Symsstrom with help from Alina Hartunian, Gigi DuVan, Eric Westervelt and Brett Nealy.

The engineer was Robert Rodriguez. The Sunday Story team also includes justinean and genie Schmitt. Our executive producer is Irene Negucci.

“I may Shirazko and up first is back tomorrow with all the news you need to start your week”

until then have a great rest of your weekend.