ICE's Secret Watchlists of Americans
Sparta, Reaper and Grapevine track protesters, their friends (+ others)


Federal agencies are not legally required to disclose how many administrative subpoenas they issue, but under the Trump administration, unnamed sources told the Post, the volume of administrative subpoenas is “well into the thousands, if not tens of thousands.” Lindsay Nash, a professor at Cardozo School of Law, authored a study on the immigration subpoena power and found, through publicly available regulations and internal records, that ICE has empowered its employees—even those focused on civil immigration enforcement—“to demand records and testimony from any person or entity in order to obtain information for any civil or criminal investigation within the agency’s broad domain.”

“At present, there is generally no requirement that officers have probable cause, identify the suspected violation, or exercise restraint,” Nash wrote. This is being exemplified with abuses like the one documented in the Post story, plus footage of federal agents taking pictures of protesters and threatening to add them to “a nice little database,” which some anonymous national security officials claim does in fact exist as a way for DHS and the FBI to track people labeled as “domestic terrorists.” (DHS publicly denies that there is such a database.)