Immigration and Customs Enforcement has stood up a round-the-clock operation to scour Facebook, Instagram and X for online criticism, paying private contractors millions to flag posts it deems a threat to its agents or its mission, according to a Wall Street Journal investigation.
The effort has swept up U.S. citizens and activist groups that track ICE activity, with contractors assembling dossiers that can include a poster's name, birth date, employer, Social Security number and vehicle records. To identify anonymous accounts, the Department of Homeland Security has sent hundreds of subpoenas to social media companies, and recently escalated to grand jury subpoenas that are harder to fight.
ICE said the work targets genuine dangers, pointing to what DHS calls an 8,000% rise in death threats against agents since President Donald Trump took office.
"Any allegation DHS and ICE are attempting to 'squash' free speech is categorically FALSE," a spokesperson said, adding that the agency investigates only credible threats.
But civil-rights attorneys and former DHS staff said the dragnet has repeatedly ensnared innocuous posts protected by the First Amendment.
“As far as I can tell, all of this is about people saying naughty things about ICE and immigration enforcement,” civil rights attorney Lauren Regan told the Journal. “Nothing that comes close to true threats.”
Reddit objected to subpoenas for 11 accounts that had merely posted content critical of federal actions, and the government withdrew them. One agency office opened at least 131 doxxing and threat cases in roughly a year. Prosecutors have won convictions where posts crossed into real threats, but attorneys say most people who are unmasked are never charged, leaving the tactic to work as intimidation.
Several flagged posts referenced Jonathan Ross, the ICE agent who fatally shot Renée Good in Minneapolis, a killing DHS called self-defense. The administration now treats organized doxxing of officers as domestic terrorism, a label it has stretched to cover filming agents at work. ICE spending on surveillance tools and consultants hit $258 million in Trump's first full year back, a 57% jump.
