On an evening in late January, Emily was driving through her Minneapolis neighborhood doing something that had become part of her routine in recent weeks: patrolling for ICE.
Emily, who NPR is only identifying by her first name because she fears retribution from the federal government, says she followed an ICE vehicle at a safe distance into a parking lot. "And then someone leaned out of the passenger side of that SUV and took a picture of me and my car," she says.
Emily says she decided to leave at that point, but the SUV made a sudden U-turn and barreled towards her, braking next to her driver's side window. A female agent wearing a gaiter-style mask rolled down the window, leaned out — and addressed Emily by name.
"She yelled, 'Emily, Emily, we're going to take you home!' Then she looked at her phone and she recited my home address," she says.
Emily says she didn't acknowledge the agents and drove away, but was so shaken that she didn't drive home, afraid the agents might follow her there. Instead she went to a nearby restaurant and waited for hours.
"I don't know how they pulled [my information] up, if they had something on me already, or if they pulled my registration," she says. "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."
Emily's experience mirrors that of many other people across the country. To understand how federal agents are using various Department of Homeland Security surveillance tools in real time, NPR collected dozens of accounts — through interviews and court documents — describing confrontations with federal immigration officers in recent months.
Activists and journalists spoke of tactics they felt were intimidating: agents photographing their faces or license plates; calling them by name; or leading them to their homes. Immigration lawyers told NPR their clients had been subjected to facial recognition technology. One ICE agent, testifying under oath, spoke of an app that showed the likely home addresses of people targeted for deportation.
The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE and Border Patrol, is using a broad web of surveillance tools — purchased as its budget has ballooned under this administration — to monitor, apprehend and intimidate both the people it seeks to deport and the U.S. citizens critical of its policies, in the real world and online.
While other law enforcement agencies have access to surveillance tech, ICE has become a leader in these tactics, according to lawyers and privacy advocates.
Loading...
Surveillance of observers
In Minnesota, the ACLU is suing the administration for violating the First Amendment rights of protesters and observers like Emily. In the lawsuit, more than 30 people gave statements under oath describing similar encounters with immigration agents.
In the lawsuit, attorneys for the government denied that the conduct of federal agents has violated the Constitution.
DHS did not respond to a question about why its agents are demonstrating they know the names of observers and where they live, but the agency did say in a statement, "DHS will not reveal law enforcement methods or tactics."
In Portland, Maine, Colleen Fagan was taking video of federal agents in January during an immigration operation outside an apartment complex and recorded the agents appearing to record her face and license plate with their phones. When she asked why they were taking her information, her video captured a masked agent responding, "'Cause we have a nice little database, and now you're considered a domestic terrorist."
Last month, Fagan joined a class action lawsuit that argues the administration is violating observers' First Amendment rights in Maine as well.
At a congressional hearing last month, acting Director for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Todd Lyons denied there is a database of protesters.
But federal immigration agents are using a facial recognition app called Mobile Fortify and U.S. Customs and Border Protection recently signed a contract with Clearview AI, a facial recognition company that has accessed billions of images of peoples' faces off the internet.
Nathan Wessler, deputy director of the ACLU's Speech Privacy and Technology Project, says we don't yet know the magnitude of how that technology is being used against protesters.
"Part of what's so pernicious about it is that people don't know what's going on," Wessler says. "Nobody should have to wonder if they are merely being intimidated or actually being subjected to an invasive biometric scan that's really just incredibly corrosive in what is supposed to be a free and open society."
In a statement to NPR, DHS stressed that Mobile Fortify, which was developed under the Trump administration, "does not access open-source material, scrape social media, or rely on publicly available data."
In cases where federal agents know observers' names and addresses, privacy advocates say federal agents may be running license plates to access Department of Motor Vehicle data to find out who the car is registered to and their home address.
Elle, a South Minneapolis resident who has frequently observed ICE activity in her neighborhood, says immigration officers have addressed her by the name of her wife, who her car is registered under. NPR is withholding her last name because she fears retaliation from the federal government for speaking out.
"They would 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," Elle says.
In early January, Elle says she was following immigration officers who led her back to her home and stopped briefly outside. Later that day, she says she learned from her wife and housemate that the officers returned and banged on the front door.
One way ICE can access state DMV data is through Nlets, a nonprofit that facilitates data sharing between law enforcement agencies. Late last year, a group of Democratic lawmakers called on Democratic governors to cut off ICE's access to their DMV data in Nlets "in response to Donald Trump politicizing and weaponizing the agency."
Minnesota is one of a handful of states that have taken that step, but "there are so many different ways that DHS can obtain this data," said Emily Tucker, executive director at the Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown Law. "If states cut off their access through Nlets, they can go to data brokers like Thomson Reuters or Lexis Nexis."
Last May, ICE spent $5 million on a subscription with Thomson Reuters, which sells data to both the public and private sector, to provide what ICE describes as "license plate reader data to enhance investigations for potential arrest, seizure and forfeiture."
Over the last year, the Trump administration has undertaken an unprecedented project of aggregating Americans' personal data and making more of it accessible to ICE. A data sharing agreement with Health and Human Services gives ICE the names, dates of birth and home addresses of immigrants without legal status who are included in Medicaid data. ICE also brokered an agreement with the Internal Revenue Service, but last week a federal judge found the IRS had violated federal tax law when it disclosed address information to ICE for more than 42,000 individuals.
That builds on a staggering data collection effort by ICE that ramped up during Trump's first term. As of 2022, ICE could locate three out of four American adults through their utility records, and the agency had scanned one in three Americans' driver's license photos, a study by Georgetown Law's Center on Privacy and Technology found at the time.
In addition, the use of automatic license plate readers has exploded around the country in recent years, which allows law enforcement to tap into a vast network of cameras to search the movements of specific cars. DHS personnel have direct access to some of these networks, and have been able to use relationships with local law enforcement to access others.
ICE also has tools that can track locations from cell phone data. On Tuesday, a group of more than 70 Democratic members of Congress sent a letter to the DHS Office of Inspector General requesting an investigation into the agency's use of such technology without obtaining a warrant.
Surveillance of Immigrants
Olga Fedorova is a freelance photojournalist who was working in Minneapolis during the height of the immigration crackdown earlier this year. She often followed federal agents around the city, and says she saw them frequently scanning the faces of people they stopped.
"They would take their phone, point the phone at the person, and you can see that the person's face is literally being scanned. Their face takes up the entire screen, and it's sort of pending," Fedorova says.
The app Fedorova saw in action was likely Mobile Fortify, which a DHS document describes as utilizing "CBP's facial comparison or DHS's fingerprint matching to quickly verify subjects of interest during operations."
Fedorova says every time she saw it used, the person the agents stopped appeared to be Hispanic.
One time, Fedorova photographed a man who was pulled over by agents in his car and had his face scanned. She says the man showed the agents a paper, but was detained anyway.
"His car was just left on the street," she says.
Lawyers NPR spoke to described having clients whose faces were scanned by Mobile Fortify and were taken into custody even though the app failed to identify them. Stephen Manning, an immigration attorney and executive director of Innovation Law Lab in Portland, Ore., represented a farmworker who was detained after ICE agents pulled over a van she was riding in.
"They Mobile Fortified her and it was inaccurate both times," Manning told NPR.
In a statement to NPR, DHS defended its accuracy, saying it operates with a "deliberately high matching threshold."
In a hearing in the farmworker case, an ICE agent identified by the initials J.B. testified about another app, called ELITE made by Palantir, that he described as being similar to "Google Maps" that shows locations of people who may be deportable and the likelihood they live there.
J.B. described using the app as providing "leads" to choose where to do an operation.
Another ICE agent with the initials D.R. gave insight into how ICE agents use license plate information to then find deportable people.
D.R. testified that when agents arrived at a Woodburn, Ore., apartment complex in October, "we began running license plates," and said the purpose was to "try to tie a vehicle to the potential target."
ICE started using the ELITE app in June, according to a DHS document detailing its technology that uses AI.
The app draws from DHS information systems as well as new data ICE has received from other agencies, like home addresses from Medicaid records. A Palantir blog post describes this as "limited data shared by other agencies under a data sharing agreement permitting it to be used for immigration enforcement purposes."
"They're using data and they're aggregating data that they would otherwise need a warrant for," Manning told NPR. "So legally it's very scary to me because it's through technology they're bypassing the Fourth Amendment."
DHS did not respond to a request for comment about the ELITE app.
Surveillance online
DHS's web of surveillance also extends to social media. NPR spoke to two people with hundreds of thousands of followers on Instagram who said they had their Global Entry status revoked after making posts critical of ICE. The link between those events and their posts is unclear.
What's more clear is the administration's use of administrative subpoenas, sent to tech companies like Google or Meta, demanding personal information to unmask anonymous accounts. Such subpoenas — which can be issued by federal agencies without a judge or a grand jury — have typically been used with tech companies in cases involving serious offenses like child sexual abuse material. Now, privacy and civil rights experts say they're being used to threaten free speech.
"What we've seen is a growing trend, but I think we've only seen the tip of the iceberg," says Steve Loney, senior supervising attorney at the ACLU of Pennsylvania, which has represented several people who have had their online information subpoenaed this way.
Loney says a pattern has started to emerge 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 from their social media company that says the government has requested your data," he says.
Sherman Austin, a 42-year-old resident of Long Beach, Calif., got one of those emails last September from Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook.
"I thought at first it was like a scam, or some kind of phishing thing going on," he says.
The email, which NPR reviewed, informed Austin that law enforcement was seeking information on his Instagram account.
"We may need to respond to this legal request within less than ten (10) days if we have a reasonable belief that we are legally required to do so," the email read.
In response to a request for comment on administrative subpoenas, Meta referred NPR to a webpage for questions about how the company handles data requests from the government.
Austin runs an account called @stopicenet, which regularly posts about ICE activity, and collaborates with other users who do the same. Just days before he received the email from Meta, he shared a post that identified an ICE agent operating in California, all through publicly available information, including a name tag the officer was wearing in a photo taken in public.
After a few emails with Meta, Austin was able to get a heavily redacted copy of the administrative subpoena from DHS, which NPR also reviewed. The department listed the reason as "Officer Safety/Doxing."
"Which I thought was funny, because how can you dox someone if they've already made their information public?" Austin says.
DHS Secretary Kristi Noem has repeatedly warned that sharing officer information will be treated as a criminal act. Generally, the act of doxing is considered revealing personal information beyond a person's name, like a home address, phone number or Social Security Number.
Within days, Austin asked a federal court to block the subpoena.
Austin is public about running his account, but several other accounts that collaborated on the post — who also received subpoenas — are run anonymously. One of those users also filed a motion to block the subpoena, under the pseudonym "J. Doe".
"When I imagine what could happen to me and my family if my identity is released to the government, it terrifies me," J. Doe wrote in an affidavit.
DHS withdrew both subpoenas after they were challenged in court, something Loney, with the ACLU of Pennsylvania, says has happened every time he's aware of so far.
"The ability to criticize the government anonymously is baked into our First Amendment rights," Loney says. "Technically speaking, there's nothing the government should be able to do to them, but that doesn't mean the government's not going to try."
Copyright 2026 NPR
