How ICE Is Weaponizing Social Media Against Its Critics

In recent months, ICE has deployed a round-the-clock digital dragnet to scour the public internet—from Facebook to Instagram to X—for speech that could endanger the agency’s mission. The government has paid millions to private contractors to surface everything from potential threats to agents to activities that could disrupt ICE’s operations, according to federal documents, contractors and former Homeland Security Investigations agents.

The program has ensnared U.S. citizens and activist groups that alert community members about ICE activity. Contractors prepare daily reports and dossiers on threat actors, identifying the poster’s name, location, date of birth, workplace, Social Security number, vehicle registration and criminal history when possible.

To unmask anonymous online critics, DHS has sent hundreds of subpoenas to social-media companies, according to people familiar with the matter. Its agents have tracked down Americans at work and on the road, asking them to sign letters acknowledging their online speech about ICE “may” be a crime.

DHS says it is trying to protect its agents and their families from “coordinated campaigns of violence” that have fueled an 8,000% increase in death threats since Trump took office.But civil-rights lawyers and former DHS staffers say the approach has swept up people expressing opinions that are 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,” said Lauren Regan, a civil-rights attorney who has represented multiple people investigated by the government over their online speech, including Tired_Thumb. “Nothing that comes close to true threats.”

An agency spokesperson said that ICE’s investigative methods abide by the Constitution and respects civil liberties and privacy interests. “Any allegation DHS and ICE are attempting to ‘squash’ free speech is categorically FALSE,” the spokesperson said. “ICE investigates all credible threats towards its employees, officers and families.”

DHS sent administrative subpoenas to Reddit for the information of 11 accounts that had posted “content critical of federal actions” between July and December of last year, the company’s most recent transparency reporting period, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Reddit determined that these users were engaged in protected activity under the First Amendment and objected to each, the person said, and DHS eventually withdrew the requests.

“Privacy is central to how Reddit operates,” said Ben Lee, chief legal officer, adding that the company routinely objects to government requests that are “overbroad or threaten users’ privacy or civil rights, including their First Amendment rights.”

Recently, the government has resorted to grand jury subpoenas, which carry more legal weight, to identify users.

“The question is: Are these being used for actual investigations of purported crimes, or are they being used to build a watchlist?” said Joshua Koltun, an attorney who has represented two Americans whose identities were the subject of social-media subpoenas in recent months.

One person compared ICE officers to Nazis on X in January—including writing that “All ICE Agents need to be put down like the dogs they are.” She was visited at home by ICE agents roughly four months later, after a court ordered the social-media company to turn over her information. The plainclothes agents told her not to post like that again, then left, the woman said. She hasn’t faced charges but has curbed her speech on social media.

The Supreme Court has held that true threats aren’t protected by the Constitution, but political hyperbole is—noting in a landmark decision that the “language of the political arena” is often “vituperative, abusive, and inexact.”

Several U.S. citizens who have come under scrutiny posted information about immigration officers—from the locations of agents carrying out enforcement to officer names to home addresses—on social media.

The Trump administration considers the “organized doxxing of law enforcement” to be a form of domestic terrorism. DHS has asserted that videotaping law enforcement on the job and posting the footage online constitutes doxxing. When a local news outlet reported that Jonathan Ross was the agent who killed Renee Good, DHS called it “reckless behavior” and said the paper should “delete their story immediately.”

Sharing a federal law enforcement officer’s personal information is generally not considered a crime without evidence of criminal intent, a historically high bar in court, according to constitutional scholars and defense attorneys.

“They’re not actually filing any criminal charges where we can challenge the vagueness, the overreach and the abuse of that statute,” said Regan, the civil-rights attorney. “If they just want to use this as an intimidation tactic, it’s not even a fair fight.”

In the past year, the Justice Department has successfully prosecuted several Americans in cases involving speech about ICE officers online, including an Oklahoma man convicted of threatening to kill federal agents after he wrote “we as US citizens should be gunning down these domestic terrorists” on X, along with several other posts about agents needing to be shot.

Two women were found guilty of stalking in Los Angeles after they followed an ICE agent’s vehicle while livestreaming on the popular ‘ice_out_ofla” Instagram account and ended up at his home. (Both have said they thought his car was headed to an immigration raid.)

The Justice Department didn’t respond to requests for comment.

The Journal obtained the user’s Reddit activity during that period through archival data, identifying three comments that mentioned ICE—including two that carried the initials, “ACAB,” shorthand for “all cops are bastards.” In one in January, Tired_Thumb weighed in on a thread about a local news article that identified Ross as the agent who had killed Good two days before.

After one user posted, “I guess he’ll have to move to Florida or Texas now where he’ll be hailed as a hero,” Tired_Thumb mentioned various states and a city where Ross had lived, information that has been reported by news outlets. “Hopefully he moves up to Stillwater State Penitentiary,” Tired_Thumb added in his comment.

DHS has said Ross acted in self-defense. He hasn’t faced charges.

The legal nonprofit Civil Liberties Defense Center filed a motion seeking to quash the subpoena, arguing that their client was exercising protected free speech. The federal government withdrew its original subpoena and responded with a grand jury subpoena requesting roughly an additional month of social-media activity, dating back to December 2025.

During that period, Tired_Thumb replied to a post that claimed to identify an ICE agent who assisted another officer as he dragged a woman by the arm across a Minnesota street in a viral video, as onlookers yelled that she was pregnant. Tired_Thumb looked up the name on a public records search website and shared the agent’s phone number in a comment, pasting the link to their source seconds later. He wrote “Abolish ICE and erase all borders” a few days before. Tired_Thumb didn’t make any other comments about the agency in this period, Reddit data shows.

As of last month, the federal government is still attempting to learn Tired_Thumb’s identity. Grand jury proceedings over the user’s case are continuing, six months after the original summons was issued. Their motion to quash the grand jury subpoena was recently denied, and the judge granted a motion to stay the case while an appeal makes its way through a higher court.

In the past year, OPR spearheaded an initiative to dramatically expand the agency’s ability to monitor online critics and potential threats, according to contractors, federal documents and former HSI agents.

Teams of contractors now scour the internet using sophisticated surveillance tools to find commentary that the agency regards as potentially dangerous.

ICE spending on surveillance technology and consultants has surged, reaching $258 million during Trump’s first full year back in the White House, a 57% increase from the same period a year prior, according to the Journal’s analysis.

ICE has inked at least six contracts that involve scanning public records for “threats,” paying out nearly $50 million since 2020. More than half those funds were obligated since last January, and another award potentially worth up to $50 million the agency continues to extend. The most recent awards call for contractors to help the agency geolocate individuals labeled as “extremists,” compile reports on individuals and cross-reference information with government databases, contracting documents show.

To help build its dragnet, OPR turned to Amivero—a small, Virginia-based technology firm better known for software development than intelligence gathering—which secured a contract of over $8 million to monitor social media for threats and plans to interfere with ICE enforcement last September. Amivero subcontracted the work to Guidehouse, a global consulting firm that works with the U.S. on defense and intelligence efforts, among other clients and services. Amivero and Guidehouse didn’t respond to several requests for comment.

The notice for OPR’s new threat initiative calls for the monitoring of nearly 20 social sites, including Reddit, Discord, Snapchat and LinkedIn, and the use of public documents such as DMV records and police reports to identify and map key relationships of users who have been flagged as a “threat originator.” It also requires analysts to use machine learning to analyze and detect risks, including through AI-powered “anticipatory threat intelligence,” which identifies trends or patterns of potential threats before they come to fruition.

The monitoring initiative identified so many potential threats early on that the small-staffed Office of Professional Responsibility needed to recruit the help of the HSI Office of Intelligence to handle them all, according to former ICE employees and federal notices. HSI Intelligence is currently leading anti-doxxing and threat mitigation efforts for the ICE workforce through contract services, according to an agency spokesperson.

The spokesperson declined to comment on specific investigative activities, saying, “these efforts are focused on credible threats of violence directed against the ICE workforce.”

Attorneys the Journal spoke to said they began to see a spike in subpoenas for U.S. citizens’ information around September 2025. That was the month the threat contract launched.

The agency’s new social-media threat monitoring program receives oversight from the ICE Privacy Office, in consultation with DHS’ Privacy Office, government documents show.

Both have bled employees. The ICE Privacy Office is down to two full-time staffers, according to former government employees familiar with the matter.

OPR has investigated at least 131 incidents of doxxing and threats towards agency personnel between January 2025 and March of this year, according to a court declaration filed in April, including for posting personal information of ICE employees on social media or fliers in an attempt to identify them and “anti-ICE group chats.”

“We’re seeing the weaponization of privacy in ways that privilege the powerful, and in particular, law enforcement,” said Danielle Citron, a law professor who specializes in cyberstalking, privacy and civil rights at the University of Virginia.

“Law enforcement who are serving the public, they’re hiding their names,” she added. “They’re hiding their faces. If they had their names on badges and they weren’t wearing masks, you might see less of this activity.”

Voting-site confrontation

Three months after Tired_Thumb learned of the government investigation, a New York poll worker named Paigelynne Gonyea received a voicemail from a man identifying himself as an agent with Homeland Security.

“We were just calling you in reference to a post that we believe you made on Instagram where you doxxed an ICE agent back in January,” said the caller.

Shortly after, two agents from ICE OPR arrived at the voting site where she was working.

They held printed screenshots from her account, she said, including the post in question. The agents flipped by it quickly, she said, but she caught one thing: The post included a photo of Ross, the immigration officer who killed Good.

The file that agents were holding also contained Gonyea’s address, date of birth and what looked like a picture of her taken at airport security, she said. They told her to take down the post and asked her to sign a letter acknowledging she had been informed that she “may” have violated federal law with her social-media account.