Washington, DC — As families across the country prepare for to come together for the Thanksgiving holiday, the Trump administration’s escalating pursuit of mass deportations is focused on “Big Brother” tactics that threaten the rights of all Americans – from the FBI infiltrating immigration activists’ private messaging chats to CBP’s violent roadshows spreading to communities far from the border.
According to Vanessa Cárdenas, America’s Voice Executive Director:
“The Deep State has arrived thanks to Donald Trump. The administration’s massive and violent anti-immigrant crusade is not just cracking down on our immigrant friends and neighbors, but also the rights, liberties and privacy of all Americans. It seems that in response to the American majority recoiling and saying ‘enough,’ the Trump administration’s response is to escalate and go for broke, including through a surveillance dragnet that should raise alarms no matter your politics.”
See below for key stories of escalating police state surveillance tactics on display to further the Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda:
- Pam Bondi and Kristi Noem to helm centralized command of joint FBI/ICE task forces set for all 50 states: As Brittany Gibson in Axios reports, a “new cluster of joint task forces is quietly becoming a potent part of President Trump’s mass deportations push…The task forces, co-led by the FBI and ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations unit, will eventually have outposts in all 50 states … They’ll have a centralized command center led by Attorney General Pam Bondi and Homeland Security Kristi Noem.”
- Border Patrol monitoring travel patterns of millions of Americans. In a story titled, “Border Patrol is monitoring US drivers and detaining those with ‘suspicious’ travel patterns,” the Associated Press writes, “The U.S. Border Patrol is monitoring millions of American drivers nationwide in a secretive program to identify and detain people whose travel patterns it deems suspicious.”
- FBI spied on a Signal chat of immigration activists: The Guardian reports, “The FBI spied on a Signal group chat of immigration activists, records reveal,” noting the orchestrated spying on a private chat of activists “who were organizing ‘courtwatch’ efforts in New York City this spring … Spencer Reynolds, a civil liberties advocate and former senior intelligence counsel with the DHS, said the FBI report was part of a pattern of the US government criminalizing free speech activities … ‘The US government is turning these powerful national security agencies towards critics and people who are standing up for the rights of immigrants, and while it’s so shocking to see something like this, it’s not surprising … These activities, and public access to our courts, are lawful and protected by our rights in the US constitution, yet routinely we’re seeing federal officials portray efforts to obtain basic accountability as threats.’”
- Nick Miroff writes in The Atlantic, “Every State Is a Border Patrol State,” noting, “[n]o president has ever used the Border Patrol this way. But the agency is modeling the kind of aggressive tactics Trump wants, raising the likelihood that the next phase of his crackdown will be more confrontational and violent … Within 100 miles of the U.S. border, [CBP] agents have the authority to operate roadside checkpoints and question the immigration status of passing motorists. Outside those areas, agents are allowed to question someone if they can articulate factors that add up to a reasonable suspicion that the person lacks legal status. This is a lower threshold than probable cause … Soon after they arrived in Los Angeles, Bovino’s teams were sued for racially profiling Hispanic residents. A district court ordered Bovino to stop, but the Trump administration appealed to the Supreme Court, which sided with the government. Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s concurrence affirmed the ability of U.S. agents to use factors including ethnic appearance and speaking Spanish to develop a reasonable suspicion of illegal presence. The Trump administration viewed the ruling as a major victory, and a green light for Bovino to double down.”
- Vittoria Elliott writes in Wired, “Social Security Data Is Openly Being Shared With DHS to Target Immigrants,” noting, “the Social Security Administration (SSA) quietly updated a public notice to reveal that the agency would be sharing “citizenship and immigration information” with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). This data sharing was already happening: WIRED reported in April that the Trump administration had already started pooling sensitive data from across the government for the purpose of immigration enforcement.”
Resources and Reminders
- Read the America’s Voice July statement: “In Pursuit of Mass Deportation: “Big Brother” Is Always Watching—and So Is the Trump Administration”
