With Immigration and Customs Enforcement now poised to become a surveillance-and-detention combine on the scale of the East German Stasi, it has acquired the standard operating procedure of an authoritarian police state. As the Trump White House sets ICE agents on the warpath in workplaces, university campuses, churches, and other public venues, they are less interested in conventional peacekeeping or border enforcement than in punishing thoughtcrimes and unleashing vigilante raids against any and all brown-skinned Spanish-speaking immigrants—or people who might simply resemble them. A pair of recent court cases have singled out this MO in gruesome terms that should alarm any Americans concerned with this country’s embattled civil liberties and speech protections. 

In a federal trial in Boston challenging the Trump administration’s efforts to deport student protesters against the Gaza war, Peter Hatch, an assistant intelligence director with ICE’s parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security, described how DHS convened a “tiger team” dedicated to streamlining deportation cases. And in targeting 100 foreign students, DHS drew information about more than 75 of them, Politico reporters Josh Gerstein and Kyle Cheney write, from the shadowy Israel-based doxxing site Canary Mission. “Many of the names or even most of the names came from that website,” Hatch testified, noting that in a verbal exchange with a superior, he was told to review all 5,000 reports on the Canary Mission site. That meant pulling together a tiger team that included “counterterrorism intelligence” analysts, since “a normal unit or section or group of analysts operating in a normal organizational construct couldn’t handle that workload.”

Hatch explained that his team went on to independently confirm charges drawn from the site—but that’s hardly comforting, given how loosely Canary Mission trades in unsourced and unaccountable innuendo. The site principally collects the names and data profiles of students and professors who have protested the Gaza war or otherwise criticized the Israeli government while tarring them with the charge of antisemitism, with or without evidence. Canary Mission says its aim is to “ensure that today’s radicals are not tomorrow’s employees.” The site also doesn’t divulge the identity of its own funders or lead employees, alleging in the twisted logic of conspiracy-mongering that such information would be used to assail the group’s legitimacy.

Canary Mission, in short, is a blacklist site that lobs incendiary and unfounded charges at critics of Israel from behind a shield of anonymity. That the strategists behind federal immigration enforcement are drawing on it as a primary source of raw intelligence is perhaps the greatest travesty among many in the agency’s roster of anti-constitutional abuses, offering yet more evidence that ICE is acting as a glorified vigilante force. (In addition, Hatch testified that DHS also relied on the blacklisting site Betar, which has called for the Trump White House to denaturalize US citizens for their opposition to Israel and the Gaza War.)

The case at the heart of the Boston trial is already proof of the ideological hijacking of DHS and ICE—it’s an action brought by the American Association of University Professors and the Middle East Studies Association, citing the high-profile attempts at deportation of Mahmoud Khalil, Rumeysa Ozturk, and other student critics of Israel whom ICE has detained under the direction of US Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Both Ozturk and Khalil have been returned from detention pending the outcome of their cases, but, as the plaintiffs in the Boston case allege, they were singled out for their speech and detained under an obscure law that Rubio invoked to make the absurd case that their presence in the United States undermined US foreign policy interests. But Ozturk, whose activism was largely confined to a single op-ed in the Tufts student newspaper, and Khalil, an organizer of pro-Palestine protests at Columbia, were upholding civic strengths of the American republic by calling out the abuses and excesses of American power abroad. As is always the case under Trump’s authoritarian rule, the assault on democratic governance is coming from inside the house.

More specifically, it’s coming at the behest of the White House’s lead immigration ghoul, deputy chief of staff for policy Stephen Miller. As Gerstein and Cheney report, the documents in the Boston case reveal that Miller was deeply involved in navigating the student deportation cases through the White House; one State Department official testified that Miller was helping direct interagency calls on pending deportations “at least weekly.” (The White House has refused to confirm the extent of Miller’s involvement, on the bogus grounds of executive privilege.)

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It so happens that Miller is also at least tangentially connected to Canary Mission and clearly shares its worldview, per a recent Mother Jones report by Sophie Hurwitz. Rabbi Ben Packer, who was listed in 2016 as a board member for the site’s Israel-registered parent nonprofit, Magamot Shalom, says he was a campus rabbi at Duke University when Miller was enrolled there as an undergraduate, and befriended the future Trump adviser there. (In an interview with Hurwitz, Packer disclaimed any association with either Magamot Shalom or Canary Mission, but voiced support for Canary Mission’s goals.) While at Duke, Miller was apparently pursuing a Canary Mission–style inquisition into student critics of Israel on a freelance basis:

At that time, Miller was active in campus pro-Israel politics. He wrote student newspaper columns inveighing against the school’s Palestine Solidarity Movement chapter and—as journalist Jean Guerrero reported—insisted to Duke administrators that there was “terrorist recruitment” happening at an on-campus Palestine Solidarity Movement conference. According to an administrator Guerrero interviewed, Miller was never able to provide proof.

“I think he’s a great guy,” Packer said of Miller. “I think he means well, I think he works very hard, I think he has the interests of the American people and the Jewish people really close to his heart.”

Miller’s handiwork at DHS and ICE is front and center in another chilling lawsuit that the ACLU filed recently, over the vigilante raids against residents of Los Angeles. That suit, combined with the disclosures in the Boston case, offers a grim foretaste of how ICE—which is due to hire more than 10,000 new agents via its $170 billion budget line in the recently signed Trump spending law—is already functioning like the detainment arm of an immigration police state. The complaint outlines a standard MO in the area’s immigration raids that follows no legible course of constitutional law enforcement:

The raids in this District follow a common, systematic pattern. Individuals with brown skin are approached or pulled aside by unidentified federal agents, suddenly and with a show of force, and made to answer questions about who they are and where they are from. If they hesitate, attempt to leave, or do not answer the questions to the satisfaction of the agents, they are detained, sometimes tackled, handcuffed, and/or taken into custody. In these interactions, agents typically have no prior information about the individual and no warrant of any kind. If agents make an arrest, contrary to federal law, they do not make any determination of whether a person poses a risk of flight before a warrant can be obtained.

ICE detainees are then marshaled into “an ICE basement holding area in downtown Los Angeles” where “conditions are deplorable and unconstitutional,” the suit alleges. “The government has also unlawfully deprived those arrested of access to counsel. Under such conditions, some of those arrested are pressured into accepting voluntary departure. The government is aware that its actions are unconstitutional and contrary to officers’ training, but deliberately persists because this system allows it to coerce removals, avoid public accountability, and ultimately—given the limited bed space at longer-term detention facilities in the area—keep arrest numbers high.”

The complaint goes on to detail how ICE agents have apprehended day laborers, farm workers, and service employees on no grounds other than their apparent Hispanic ethnicity. One witness at a raid carried out at a church reported that ICA agents detained one parishioner because he was “dark-skinned and only spoke Spanish. They don’t care if you have papers, as long as you look like what they want you to look like, they’ll take you.” Another witness recounted a SWAT-style deployment of 60 heavily armed agents at a swap meet, where, again, the mandate behind the raid was simple; “if you looked Hispanic in any way, they just took you.”

These are the obscene consequences of Miller’s pronouncement that ICE must carry out 3,000 deportations a day—a quota that comes as the Trump White House has aggressively cracked down on border crossings, ensuring that many legal immigrants and US citizens get swept up in indiscriminate ICE raids. Miller conceded as much himself, when he instructed field agents to go after “everybody” instead of confirmed criminal offenders—thereby unleashing the unprovoked raids on Home Depots where day laborers congregate, and the sweeps across all LA communities that have now gotten so menacing that Bishop Amberto Rojas has excused Latino Catholics from attending mass for fear of ICE detention.

What compounds ICE’s reign of terror in LA is that the arresting agents conceal their identities, further dodging legal accountability for their actions as they act with ever greater impunity. It’s no wonder, in other words, that the new Trump immigration regime has joined forces with an anonymized McCarthyite inquisition like Canary Mission.