Meet the new year, same as the old year, at least as far as America’s measles problem goes. We talked a lot about this disease last year, and for good reason. In RFK Jr.’s first year as Secretary of HHS, America managed to suffer its worst measles infection count since 1991. A direct product of the anti-vaxxer bullshit Kennedy and his followers have been pushing for years, America collected 2,144 confirmed cases of measles in 2025. That number is certainly an under-count, with who knows how many undiagnosed cases existing out there. Three people, including two otherwise healthy children, died. America is all but certain to have lost its elimination status of the disease. Of all the gravel-mouthed words that spilled out of Kennedy’s mouth in 2025, there were relatively few of them reserved for this highly contagious and deadly disease that is now circulating via various outbreaks in the country who’s health he’s in charge of managing.
The start of 2026 is likely to set us up for an even worse year for measles than the last. Over 5% of the total infections of measles in 2025 were reported in the last week of the year or so. It’s not slowing down. This disaster of a train may be still pulling out of the station, but it’s picking up speed. And while the CDC’s measles website, linked above, isn’t updated more than once a week at most, health officials are reporting a ton of infections in the ongoing South Carolina outbreak alone.
In a regularly scheduled update this afternoon, the health department said 99 cases were identified since Tuesday, bringing the outbreak total to 310 cases. There are currently 200 people in quarantine and nine in isolation. However, the outbreak is expanding so quickly and with so many exposure sites that health officials are struggling to trace cases and identify people at risk.
“An increasing number of public exposure sites are being identified with likely hundreds more people exposed who are not aware they should be in quarantine if they are not immune to measles,” Linda Bell, state epidemiologist and the health department’s incident commander for the measles outbreak, said in the announcement. “Previous measles transmission studies have shown that one measles case can result in up to 20 new infections among unvaccinated contacts.”
It’s not just the unvaccinated any longer. As 2025 went on, we began to see an uptick in what are called “breakthrough cases.” Health professionals who know what they’re talking about will tell you that 2 doses of the MMR vaccine are roughly 97% effective in preventing a measles infection. That leaves 3% of people exposed at a minimum and that’s before we get into the discussion of how that number is impacted the lower we get from the 95% immunization target to achieve true herd immunity. And if you followed the reported infection statistics throughout last year as I did, you saw the percentage of infections occurring among those that had gotten either 1 or 2 doses of the MMR vaccine increase.
At the end of the year, 3% of the infected had had one dose of the MMR vaccine, and 4% had two doses. Early in the year, those were hovering between 1% and 2% and then grew. Responsible people who protected not only themselves but their fellow citizens by doing the right thing and getting their shots were put at risk and infected by those who didn’t. This failure of civil responsibility once again went largely unchallenged by RFK Jr. because of some combination of lunacy and his own financial interests.
And the real fun hasn’t even begun yet. Measles is crazy infectious and likes to hide its contagious nature early in the infection, not to mention that the disease causes immunity amnesia for all kinds of other diseases, making those infected susceptible to all kinds of diseases despite inoculation, such as chickenpox and COVID19.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which only has data as of January 6, has tallied three confirmed cases for this year (two in South Carolina and one in North Carolina, linked to the South Carolina outbreak). Since then, South Carolina reported 26 cases on Tuesday and 99 today, totaling 125. North Carolina also reported three additional cases Tuesday, again linked to the South Carolina outbreak. In all, that brings the US tally to at least 131 just nine days into the year.
Do the math. Even if we pretend for a moment that infectious diseases like measles don’t work on an exponential schedule, we’re already on pace for well over 5,000 measles infections this year. Unless something is done, it will be many, many more cases than that. And a possible resurgence of COVID19, something to which I really did think Trump would be particularly allergic.
Unfortunately, rationality appears to have gone out of style. Replaced, I suppose, by a facial rash that then descends into further complications.
This story was originally published by ProPublica.Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0license. The original version has even more horrifying photographs and videos of agents engaging in this kind of behavior.
Immigration agents have put civilians’ lives at risk using more than their guns.
An agent in Houston put a teenage citizen into a chokehold, wrapping his arm around the boy’s neck, choking him so hard that his neck had red welts hours later. A black-masked agent in Los Angeles pressed his knee into a woman’s neck while she was handcuffed; she then appeared to pass out. An agent in Massachusetts jabbed his finger and thumb into the neck and arteries of a young father who refused to be separated from his wife and 1-year-old daughter. The man’s eyes rolled back in his head and he started convulsing.
After George Floyd’s murder by a police officer six years ago in Minneapolis — less than a mile from where an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot and killed Renee Good last week — police departments and federal agencies banned chokeholds and other moves that can restrict breathing or blood flow.
But those tactics are back, now at the hands of agents conducting President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign.
Examples are scattered across social media. ProPublica found more than 40 cases over the past year of immigration agents using these life-threatening maneuvers on immigrants, citizens and protesters. The agents are usually masked, their identities secret. The government won’t say if any of them have been punished.
In nearly 20 cases, agents appeared to use chokeholds and other neck restraints that the Department of Homeland Security prohibits “unless deadly force is authorized.”
About two dozen videos show officers kneeling on people’s necks or backs or keeping them face down on the ground while already handcuffed. Such tactics are not prohibited outright but are often discouraged, including by federal trainers, in part because using them for a prolonged time risks asphyxiation.
We reviewed footage with a panel of eight former police officers and law enforcement experts. They were appalled.
This is what bad policing looks like, they said. And it puts everyone at risk.
“I arrested dozens upon dozens of drug traffickers, human smugglers, child molesters — some of them will resist,” said Eric Balliet, who spent more than two decades working at Homeland Security Investigations and Border Patrol, including in the first Trump administration. “I don’t remember putting anybody in a chokehold. Period.”
“If this was one of my officers, he or she would be facing discipline,” said Gil Kerlikowske, a longtime police chief in Seattle who also served as Customs and Border Protection commissioner under President Barack Obama. “You have these guys running around in fatigues, with masks, with ‘Police’ on their uniform,” but they aren’t acting like professional police.
Over the past week, the conduct of agents has come under intense scrutiny after an ICE officer in Minneapolis killed Good, a mother of three. The next day, a Border Patrol agent in Portland, Oregon, shot a man and woman in a hospital parking lot.
Top administration officials rushed to defend the officers. Speaking about the agent who shot Good, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem said, “This is an experienced officer who followed his training.”
Officials said the same thing to us after we showed them footage of officers using prohibited chokeholds. Federal agents have “followed their training to use the least amount of force necessary,” department spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said.
“Officers act heroically to enforce the law and protect American communities,” White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said.
Both DHS and the White House lauded the “utmost professionalism” of their agents.
Our compilation of incidents is far from complete. Just as the government does not count how often it detains citizens or smashes through vehicle windows during immigration arrests, it does not publicly track how many times agents have choked civilians or otherwise inhibited their breathing or blood flow. We gathered cases by searching legal filings, social media posts and local press reports in English and Spanish.
Given the lack of any count over time, it’s impossible to know for certain how agents’ current use of the banned and dangerous tactics compares with earlier periods.
But former immigration officials told us they rarely heard of such incidents during their long tenures. They also recalled little pushback when DHS formally banned chokeholds and other tactics in 2023; it was merely codifying the norm.
That norm has now been broken.
One of the citizens whom agents put in a chokehold was 16 years old.
Tenth grader Arnoldo Bazan and his father were getting McDonald’s before school when their car was pulled over by unmarked vehicles. Masked immigration agents started banging on their windows. As Arnoldo’s undocumented father, Arnulfo Bazan Carrillo, drove off, the terrified teenager began filming on his phone. The video shows the agents repeatedly ramming the Bazans’ car during a slow chase through the city.
Bazan Carrillo eventually parked and ran into a restaurant supply store. When Arnoldo saw agents taking his father violently to the ground, Arnoldo went inside too, yelling at the agents to stop.
One agent put Arnoldo in a chokehold while another pressed a knee into his father’s neck. “I was going to school!” the boy pleaded. He said later that when he told the agent he was a citizen and a minor, the agent didn’t stop.
“I started screaming with everything I had, because I couldn’t even breathe,” Arnoldo told ProPublica, showing where the agent’s hands had closed around his throat. “I felt like I was going to pass out and die.”
DHS’ McLaughlin accused Arnoldo’s dad of ramming his car “into a federal law enforcement vehicle,” but he was never charged for that, and the videos we reviewed do not support this claim. Our examination of his criminal history — separate from any immigration violations — found only that Bazan Carrillo pleaded guilty a decade ago to misdemeanor driving while intoxicated.
McLaughlin also said the younger Bazan elbowed an officer in the face as he was detained, which the teen denies. She said that Arnoldo was taken into custody to confirm his identity and make sure he didn’t have any weapons. McLaughlin did not answer whether the agent’s conduct was justified.
Experts who reviewed video of the Bazans’ arrests could make no sense of the agents’ actions.
“Why are you in the middle of a store trying to grab somebody?” said Marc Brown, a former police officer turned instructor who taught ICE and Border Patrol officers at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Centers. “Your arm underneath the neck, like a choking motion? No! The knee on the neck? Absolutely not.”
DHS revamped its training curriculum after George Floyd’s murder to underscore those tactics were out of bounds, Brown said. “DHS specifically was very big on no choking,” he said. “We don’t teach that. They were, like, hardcore against it. They didn’t want to see anything with the word ‘choke.’”
After agents used another banned neck restraint — a carotid hold — a man started convulsing and passed out.
In early November, ICE agents in Fitchburg, Massachusetts, stopped a young father, Carlos Sebastian Zapata Rivera, as he drove with his family. They had come for his undocumented wife, whom they targeted after she was charged with assault for allegedly stabbing a co-worker in the hand with scissors.
Body camera footage from the local police, obtained by ProPublica, captured much of what happened. The couple’s 1-year-old daughter began crying. Agents surrounded the car, looking in through open doors.
According to the footage, an agent told Zapata Rivera that if his wife wouldn’t come out, they would have to arrest him, too — and their daughter would be sent into the foster system. The agent recounted the conversation to a local cop: “Technically, I can arrest both of you,” he said. “If you no longer have a child, because the child is now in state custody, you’re both gonna be arrested. Do you want to give your child to the state?”
Zapata Rivera, who has a pending asylum claim, clung to his family. His wife kept saying she wouldn’t go anywhere without her daughter, whom she said was still breastfeeding. Zapata Rivera wouldn’t let go of either of them.
Federal agents seemed conflicted on how to proceed. “I refuse to have us videotaped throwing someone to the ground while they have a child in their hands,” one ICE agent told a police officer at the scene.
But after more than an hour, agents held down Zapata Rivera’s arms. One, who Zapata Rivera’s lawyer says wore a baseball cap reading “Ne Quis Effugiat” — Latin for “So That None Will Escape” — pressed his thumbs into the arteries on Zapata Rivera’s neck. The young man then appeared to pass out as bystanders screamed.
The technique is known as a carotid restraint. The two carotid arteries carry 70% of the brain’s blood flow; block them, and a person can quickly lose consciousness. The tactic can cause strokes, seizures, brain damage — and death.
“Even milliseconds or seconds of interrupted blood flow to the brain can have serious consequences,” Dr. Altaf Saadi, a neurologist and associate professor at Harvard Medical School, told us. Saadi said she couldn’t comment on specific cases, “but there is no amount of training or method of applying pressure on the neck that is foolproof in terms of avoiding neurologic damage.”
In a bystander video of Zapata Rivera’s arrest, his eyes roll back in his head and he suffers an apparent seizure, convulsing so violently that his daughter, seated in his lap, shakes with him.
“Carotid restraints are prohibited unless deadly force is authorized,” DHS’ use-of-force policy states. Deadly force is authorized only when an officer believes there’s an “imminent threat of death or serious bodily injury” and there is “no alternative.”
In a social media post after the incident and in its statement to ProPublica, DHS did not cite a deadly threat. Instead, it referenced the charges against Zapata Rivera’s wife and suggested he had only pretended to have a medical crisis while refusing help from paramedics. “Imagine FAKING a seizure to help a criminal escape justice,” the post said.
“These statements were lies,” Zapata Rivera alleges in an ongoing civil rights lawsuit he filed against the ICE agent who used the carotid restraint. His lawyer told ProPublica that Zapata Rivera was disoriented after regaining consciousness; the lawsuit says he was denied medical attention. (Representatives for Zapata Rivera declined our requests for an interview with him. His wife has been released on bond, and her assault case awaits trial.)
A police report and bodycam footage from Fitchburg officers at the scene, obtained via a public records request, back up Zapata Rivera’s account of being denied assistance. “He’s fine,” an agent told paramedics, according to footage. The police report says Zapata Rivera wanted medical attention but “agents continued without stopping.”
Saadi, the Harvard neurologist, said that as a general matter, determining whether someone had a seizure is “not something even neurologists can do accurately just by looking at it.”
DHS policy bars using chokeholds and carotid restraints just because someone is resisting arrest. Agents are doing it anyway.
When DHS issued restrictions on chokeholds and carotid restraints, it stated that the moves “must not be used as a means to control non-compliant subjects or persons resisting arrest.” Deadly force “shall not be used solely to prevent the escape of a fleeing subject.”
But videos reviewed by ProPublica show that agents have been using these restraints to do just that.
In Los Angeles in June, masked officers from ICE, Border Patrol and other federal agencies pepper-sprayed and then tackled another citizen, Luis Hipolito. As Hipolito struggled to get away, one of the agents put him in a chokehold. Another pointed a Taser at bystanders filming.
Then Hipolito’s body began to convulse — a possible seizure. An onlooker warned the agents, “You gonna let him die.”
When officers make a mistake in the heat of the moment, said Danny Murphy, a former deputy commissioner of the Baltimore Police Department, they need to “correct it as quickly as possible.”
That didn’t happen in Hipolito’s case. The footage shows the immigration agent not only wrapping his arm around Hipolito’s neck as he takes him down but also sticking with the chokehold after Hipolito is pinned on the ground.
The agent’s actions are “dangerous and unreasonable,” Murphy said.
Asked about the case, McLaughlin, the DHS spokesperson, said that Hipolito was arrested for assaulting an ICE officer. Hipolito’s lawyers did not respond to ProPublica’s requests for comment.
According to the Los Angeles Times, Hipolito limped into court days after the incident. Another citizen who was with him the day of the incident was also charged, but her case was dropped. Hipolito pleaded not guilty and goes to trial in February.
Some of the conduct in the footage isn’t banned — but it’s discouraged and dangerous.
Placing a knee on a prone subject’s neck or weight on their back isn’t banned under DHS’ use-of-force policy, but it can be dangerous — and the longer it goes on, the higher the risk that the person won’t be able to breathe.
“You really don’t want to spend that amount of time just trying to get somebody handcuffed,” said Kerlikowske, the former CPB commissioner, of the video of the arrest in Portland.
Brown, the former federal instructor and now a lead police trainer at the University of South Carolina, echoed that. “Once you get them handcuffed, you get them up, get them out of there,” he said. “If they’re saying they can’t breathe, hurry up.”
Taking a person down to the ground and restraining them there can be an appropriate way to get them in handcuffs, said Seth Stoughton, a former police officer turned law professor who also works at the University of South Carolina. But officers have long known to make it quick. By the mid-1990s, the federal government was advising officers against keeping people prolongedly in a prone position.
When a federal agent kneeled on the neck of an intensive care nurse in August, she said she understood the danger she was in and tried to scream.
“I knew that the amount of pressure being placed on the back of my neck could definitely hurt me,” said Amanda Trebach, a citizen and activist who was arrested in Los Angeles while monitoring immigration agents. “I was having a hard time breathing because my chest was on the ground.”
McLaughlin, the DHS spokesperson, said Trebach impeded agents’ vehicles and struck them with her signs and fists.
Trebach denies this. She was released without any charges.
“No, no!” one bystander exclaims. “He’s not doing anything!”
DHS’ McLaughlin did not respond to questions about the incident.
Along with two similarchoking incidents at protests outside of ICE facilities, this is one of the few videos in which the run-up to the violence is clear. And the experts were aghast.
“Without anything I could see as even remotely a deadly force threat, he immediately goes for the throat,” said Ashley Heiberger, a retired police captain from Pennsylvania who frequently testifies in use-of-force cases. Balliet, the former immigration official, said the agent turned the scene into a “pissing contest” that was “explicitly out of control.”
“It’s so clearly excessive and ridiculous,” Murphy said. “That’s the kind of action which should get you fired.”
“How big a threat did you think he was?” Brown said, noting that the officer slung his rifle around his back before grabbing and body-slamming the protester. “You can’t go grab someone just because they say, ‘F the police.’”
In November, Border Patrol agents rushed into the construction site of a future Panda Express in Charlotte, North Carolina, to check workers’ papers. When one man tried to run, an officer put him in a chokehold and later marched him out, bloodied, to a waiting SUV.
Freelance photographer Ryan Murphy, who had been following Border Patrol’s convoys around Charlotte, documented the Panda Express arrest.
“Their tactics are less sophisticated than you would think,” he told ProPublica. “They sort of drive along the streets, and if they see somebody who looks to them like they could potentially be undocumented, they pull over.”
Experts told ProPublica that if officers are targeting a specific individual, they can minimize risks by deciding when, where and how to take them into custody. But when they don’t know their target in advance, chaos — and abuse — can follow.
“They are encountering people they don’t know anything about,” said Scott Shuchart, a former assistant director at ICE.
“The stuff that I’ve been seeing in the videos,” Kerlikowske said, “has been just ragtag, random.”
There may be other factors, too, our experts said, including quotas and a lack of consequences amid gutted oversight. With officers wearing masks, Shuchart said, “even if they punch grandma in the face, they won’t be identified.”
As they sweep into American cities, immigration officers are unconstrained — and, the experts said, unprepared. Even well-trained officers may not be trained for the environments where they now operate. Patrolling a little-populated border region takes one set of skills. Working in urban areas, where citizens — and protesters — abound, takes another.
DHS and Bovino did not respond to questions about their agents’ preparation or about the chokehold in Charlotte.
Experts may think there’s abuse. But holding officers to account? That’s another matter.
Back in Houston, immigration officers dropped 16-year-old Arnoldo off at the doorstep of his family home a few hours after the arrest. His neck was bruised, and his new shirt was shredded. Videos taken by his older sisters show the soccer star struggling to speak through sobs.
Uncertain what exactly had happened to him, his sister Maria Bazan took him to Texas Children’s Hospital, where staff identified signs of the chokehold and moved him to the trauma unit. Hospital records show he was given morphine for pain and that doctors ordered a dozen CT scans and X-rays, including of his neck, spine and head.
From the hospital, Maria called the Houston Police Department and tried to file a report, the family said. After several unsuccessful attempts, she took Arnoldo to the department in person, where she says officers were skeptical of the account and their own ability to investigate federal agents.
Arnoldo had filmed much of the incident, but agents had taken his phone. He used Find My to locate the phone — at a vending machine for used electronics miles away, close to an ICE detention center. The footage, which ProPublica has reviewed, backed the family’s account of the chase.
The family says Houston police still haven’t interviewed them. A department spokesperson told ProPublica it was not investigating the case, referring questions to DHS. But the police have also not released bodycam footage and case files aside from a top sheet, citing an open investigation.
“We can’t do anything,” Maria said one officer told her. “What can HPD do to federal agents?”
Elsewhere in the country, some officials are trying to hold federal immigration officers to account.
In California, the state Legislature passed bills prohibiting immigration officers from wearing masks and requiring them to display identification during operations.
In Illinois, Gov. JB Pritzker signed a law that allows residents to sue any officer who violates state or federal constitutional rights. (The Trump administration quickly filed legal challenges against California and Illinois, claiming their new laws are unconstitutional.)
In Minnesota, state and local leaders are collecting evidence in Renee Good’s killing even as the federal government cut the state out of its investigation.
Arnoldo is still waiting for Houston authorities to help him, still terrified that a masked agent will come first. Amid soccer practice and making up schoolwork he missed while recovering, he watches and rewatches the videos from that day. The car chase, the chokehold, his own screams at the officers to leave his dad alone. His father in the driver’s seat, calmly handing Arnoldo his wallet and phone while stopping mid-chase for red lights.
The Bazan family said agents threatened to charge Arnoldo if his dad didn’t agree to be deported. DHS spokesperson McLaughlin did not respond when asked about the alleged threat. Arnoldo’s dad is now in Mexico.
Asked why an officer choked Arnoldo, McLaughlin pointed to the boy’s alleged assault with his elbow, adding, “The federal law enforcement officer graciously chose not to press charges.”
How We Did It
ProPublica journalists Nicole Foy, McKenzie Funk, Joanna Shan, Haley Clark and Cengiz Yar gathered videos via Spanish and English social media posts, local press reports and court records. We then sent a selection of these videos to eight police experts and former immigration officials, along with as much information as we could gather about the lead-up to and context of each incident. The experts analyzed the videos with us, explaining when and how officers used dangerous tactics that appeared to go against their training or that have been banned under the Department of Homeland Security’s use-of-force policy.
We also tried to contact every person we could identify being choked or kneeled on. In some cases, we also reached out to bystanders.
Research reporter Mariam Elba conducted criminal record searches of every person we featured in this story. She also attempted to fact-check the allegations that DHS made about the civilians and their arrests. Our findings are not comprehensive because there is no universal criminal record database.
We also sent every video cited in this story to the White House, DHS, CBP, ICE, border czar Tom Homan and Border Patrol’s Gregory Bovino. DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin provided a statement responding to some of the incidents we found but she did not explain why agents used banned tactics or whether any of the agents have been disciplined for doing so.
There are many different agencies under U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that deal with immigration, as well as non-immigration related agencies such as Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). ICE is specifically the enforcement arm of the U.S. immigration apparatus. Their stated mission is to “[p]rotect America through criminal investigations and enforcing immigration laws to preserve national security and public safety.”
While the NSA and FBI might be the first agencies that come to mind when thinking about surveillance in the U.S., ICE should not be discounted. ICE has always engaged in surveillance and intelligence-gathering as part of their mission. A 2022 report by Georgetown Law’s Center for Privacy and Technology found the following:
ICE had scanned the driver’s license photos of 1 in 3 adults.
ICE had access to the driver’s license data of 3 in 4 adults.
ICE was tracking the movements of drivers in cities home to 3 in 4 adults.
ICE could locate 3 in 4 adults through their utility records.
ICE built its surveillance dragnet by tapping data from private companies and state and local bureaucracies.
ICE spent approximately $2.8 billion between 2008 and 2021 on new surveillance, data collection and data-sharing programs.
With a budget for 2025 that is 10 times the size of the agency’s total surveillance spending over the last 13 years, ICE is going on a shopping spree, creating one of the largest, most comprehensive domestic surveillance machines in history.
How We Got Here
The entire surveillance industry has been allowed to grow and flourish under both Democratic and Republican regimes. For example, President Obama dramatically expanded ICE from its more limited origins, while at the same time narrowing its focus to undocumented people accused of crimes. Under the first and second Trump administrations, ICE ramped up its operations significantly, increasing raids in major cities far from the southern border and casting a much wider net on potential targets. ICE has most recently expanded its partnerships with sheriffs across the U.S., and deported more than 1.5 million people cumulatively under the Trump administrations (600,000 of those were just during the first year of Trump’s second term according to DHS statistics), not including the 1.6 million people DHS claims have “self-deported.” More horrifying is that in just the last year of the current administration, 4,250 people detained by ICE havegonemissing, and 31 have died in custody or while being detained. In contrast, 24 people died in ICE custody during the entirety of the Biden administration.
ICE also has openly stated that they plan to spy on the American public, looking for any signs of left-wing dissent against their domestic military-like presence. Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons said in a recent interview that his agency “was dedicated to the mission of going after” Antifa and left-wing gun clubs.
On a long enough timeline, any surveillance tool you build will eventually be used by people you don’t like for reasons that you disagree with. A surveillance-industrial complex and a democratic society are fundamentally incompatible, regardless of your political party.
EFF recently published a guide to using government databases to dig up homeland security spending and compiled our own dataset of companies selling tech to DHS components. In 2025, ICE entered new contracts with several private companies for location surveillance, social media surveillance, face surveillance, spyware, and phone surveillance. Let’s dig into each.
Phone Surveillance Tools
One common surveillance tactic of immigration officials is to get physical access to a person’s phone, either while the person is detained at a border crossing, or while they are under arrest. ICE renewed an $11 million contract with a company called Cellebrite, which helps ICE unlock phones and then can take a complete image of all the data on the phone, including apps, location history, photos, notes, call records, text messages, and even Signal and WhatsApp messages. ICE also signed a $3 million contract with Cellebrite’s main competitor Magnet Forensics, makers of the Graykey device for unlocking phones. DHS has had contracts with Cellebrite since 2008, but the number of phones they search has risen dramatically each year, reaching a new high of 14,899 devices searched by ICE’s sister agency U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) between April and June of 2025.
If ICE can’t get physical access to your phone, that won’t stop them from trying to gain access to your data. They have also resumed a $2 million contract with the spyware manufacturer, Paragon. Paragon makes the Graphite spyware, which made headlines in 2025 for being found on the phones of several dozen members of Italian civil society. Graphite is able to harvest messages from multiple different encrypted chat apps such as Signal and WhatsApp without the user ever knowing.
Our concern with ICE buying this software is the likelihood that it will be used against undocumented people and immigrants who are here legally, as well as U.S. citizens who have spoken up against ICE or who work with immigrant communities. Malware such as Graphite can be used to read encrypted messages as they are sent, other forms of spyware can also download files, photos, location history, record phone calls, and even discretely turn on your microphone to record you.
How to Protect Yourself
The most effective way to protect yourself from smartphone surveillance would be to not have a phone. But that’s not realistic advice in modern society. Fortunately, for most people there are other ways you can make it harder for ICE to spy on your digital life.
The first and easiest step is to keep your phone up to date. Installing security updates makes it harder to use malware against you and makes it less likely for Cellebrite to break into your phone. Likewise, both iPhone (Lockdown Mode) and Android (Advanced Protection) offer special modes that lock your phone down and can help protect against some malware.
Having your phone’s software up to date and locked with a strong alphanumeric password will offer some protection against Cellebrite, depending on your model of phone. However, the strongest protection is simply to keep your phone turned off, which puts it in “before first unlock” mode and has been typically harder for law enforcement to bypass. This is good to do if you are at a protest and expect to be arrested, if you are crossing a border, or if you are expecting to encounter ICE. Keeping your phone on airplane mode should be enough to protect against cell-site simulators, but turning your phone off will offer extra protection against cell-site simulators and Cellebrite devices. If you aren’t able to turn your phone off, it’s a good idea to at least turn off face/fingerprint unlock to make it harder for police to force you to unlock your phone. While EFF continues to fight to strengthen our legal protections against compelling people to decrypt their devices, there is currently less protection against compelled face and fingerprint unlocking than there is against compelled password disclosure.
Internet Surveillance
ICE has also spent $5 million to acquire at least two location and social media surveillance tools: Webloc and Tangles, from a company called Pen Link, an established player in the open source intelligence space. Webloc gathers the locations of millions of phones by gathering data from mobile data brokers and linking it together with other information about users. Tangles is a social media surveillance tool which combines web scraping with access to social media application programming interfaces. These tools are able to build a dossier on anyone who has a public social media account. Tangles is able to link together a person’s posting history, posts, and comments containing keywords, location history, tags, social graph, and photos with those of their friends and family. Penlink then sells this information to law enforcement, allowing law enforcement to avoid the need for a warrant. This means ICE can look up historic and current locations of many people all across the U.S. without ever having to get a warrant.
ICE also has established contracts with other social media scanning and AI analysis companies, such as a $4.2 million contract with a company called Fivecast for the social media surveillance and AI analysis tool ONYX. According to Fivecast, ONYX can conduct “automated, continuous and targeted collection of multimedia data” from all major “news streams, search engines, social media, marketplaces, the dark web, etc.” ONYX can build what it calls “digital footprints” from biographical data and curated datasets spanning numerous platforms, and “track shifts in sentiment and emotion” and identify the level of risk associated with an individual.
Another contract is with ShadowDragon for their product Social Net, which is able to monitor publicly available data from over 200 websites. In an acquisition document from 2022, ICE confirmed that ShadowDragon allowed the agency to search “100+ social networking sites,” noting that “[p]ersistent access to Facebook and Twitter provided by ShadowDragon SocialNet is of the utmost importance as they are the most prominent social media platforms.”
For U.S. citizens, making your account private on social media is a good place to start. You might also consider having accounts under a pseudonym, or deleting your social media accounts altogether. For more information, check out our guide to protecting yourself on social media. Unfortunately, people immigrating to the U.S. might be subject to greater scrutiny, including mandatory social media checks, and should consult with an immigration attorney before taking any action. For people traveling to the U.S., new rules will soon likely require them to reveal five years of social media history and 10 years of past email addresses to immigration officials.
ICE has acquired trucks equipped with cell-site simulators (AKA Stingrays) from a company called TechOps Specialty Vehicles (likely the cell-site simulators were manufactured by another company). This is not the first time ICE has bought this technology. According to documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union, ICE deployed cell-site simulators at least 466 times between 2017 and 2019, and ICE more than 1,885 times between 2013 and 2017, according to documents obtained by BuzzFeed News. Cell-site simulators can be used to track down a specific person in real time, with more granularity than a phone company or tools like Webloc can provide, though Webloc has the distinct advantage of being used without a warrant and not requiring agents to be in the vicinity of the person being tracked.
How to protect yourself
Taking public transit or bicycling is a great way to keep yourself off ALPR databases, but an even better way is to go to your local city council meetings and demand the city cancels contracts with ALPR companies, like people have done in Flagstaff, Arizona; Eugene, Oregon; and Denver, Colorado, among others.
If you are at a protest, putting your phone on airplane mode could help protect you from cell-site simulators and from apps on your phone disclosing your location, but might leave you vulnerable to advanced targeted attacks. For more advanced protection, turning your phone completely off protects against all radio based attacks, and also makes it harder for tools like Cellebrite to break into your phone as discussed above. But each individual will need to weigh their need for security from advanced radio based attacks against their need to document potential abuses through photo or video. For more information about protecting yourself at a protest, head over to SSD.
Last but not least, ICE uses tools to combine and search all this data along with the data on Americans they have acquired from private companies, the IRS, TSA, and other government databases.
To search all this data, ICE uses ImmigrationOS, a system that came from a $30-million contract with Palantir. What Palantir does is hard to explain, even for people who work there, but essentially they are plumbers. Palantir makes it so that ICE has all the data they have acquired in one place so it’s easy to search through. Palantir links data from different databases, like IRS data, immigration records, and private databases, and enables ICE to view all of this data about a specific person in one place.
The true civil liberties nightmare of Palantir is that they enable governments to link data that should have never been linked. There are good civil liberties reasons why IRS data was never linked with immigration data and was never linked with social media data, but Palantir breaks those firewalls. Palantir has labeled themselves as a progressive, human rights centric company historically, but their recent actions have given them away as just another tech company enabling surveillance nightmares.
Threat Modeling When ICE Is Your Adversary
Understanding the capabilities and limits of ICE and how to threat model helps you and your community fight back, remain powerful, and protect yourself.
One of the most important things you can do is to not spread rumors and misinformation. Rumors like “ICE has malware so now everyone’s phones are compromised” or “Palantir knows what you are doing all the time” or “Signal is broken” don’t help your community. It’s more useful to spread facts, ways to protect yourself, and ways to fight back. For information about how to create a security plan for yourself or your community, and other tips to protect yourself, read our Surveillance Self-Defense guides.
We need to have a hard look at the surveillance industry. It is a key enabler of vast and untold violations of human rights and civil liberties, and it continues to be used by aspiring autocrats to threaten our very democracy. As long as it exists, the surveillance industry, and the data it generates, will be an irresistible tool for anti-democratic forces.
Weiss is, according to a new New York Times article, not enjoying all the criticism and, like any good leader, blaming her subordinates for the problems she’s causing:
“Privately, Ms. Weiss has been deeply frustrated by the negative reaction to her decisions, and has blamed some subordinates for not stanching the criticism, three people familiar with internal discussions said.”
The “entertaining” bit is that Weiss doesn’t appear to be good at either journalism (because she’s barely done any) or agitprop (arguably the whole reason the Ellison family hired her). That’s causing some weird frictions, including this bit in the Times article where Weiss insists she doesn’t want CBS to report the news, she wants it to “be” the news:
“The goal for this road show is not to deliver the news so much as it is to *drive the news*,” Ms. Weiss wrote in a note obtained by The New York Times. “We need to *be the news* for these 10 days.”
That is an intentional misrepresentation of journalism’s function by somebody who wants to be an effective engagement troll that chases virality, but clearly doesn’t really know how to go about it at this sort of scale. Weiss built a weird little contrarian trolling blog, but that’s a completely different animal from creating a mass media propaganda machine. Just ask Roger Aisles.
I think, like many in the extraction-class funded engagement trolling industry, Weiss has deluded herself into genuinely believing she’s helpingfix journalism. But again, that’s not what the weird mishmash of 80s ski comedy villains at Ellison’s Paramount want. And I suspect that if Weiss doesn’t start doing a better job of lying to the electorate in a more exciting and ratings-grabbing way pretty soon, she’ll be replaced by a much bigger asshole (and more effective culture war troll) before the summer arrives.
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Last week, we wrote about how ICE agent Jonathan Ross murdered Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old poet and mother, on a Minneapolis street in broad daylight. We wrote about how the Trump administration immediately began lying about it despite multiple video angles showing exactly what happened. We wrote about how the media called documented murder a “dispute.”
This week, we’re writing about how career Justice Department prosecutors—people who’ve spent their careers putting away fraudsters, drug dealers, and actual criminals—looked at how the administration is handling this case and said: we want no part of this.
Because apparently the DOJ’s response to an ICE agent murdering an unarmed American citizen wasn’t to investigate the agent who pulled the trigger. It was to investigate the victim and her widow.
A federal agent shot an unarmed woman multiple times in the head at close range. Video evidence directly contradicts every administration claim about what happened. And the Justice Department’s priority is figuring out what activist groups the dead woman might have been associated with?
Really?
According to reporting from the New York Times, at least six federal prosecutors in the Minnesota U.S. Attorney’s Office resigned on Tuesday over this approach:
Joseph H. Thompson, who was second in command at the U.S. attorney’s office and oversaw asprawling fraud investigationthat has roiled Minnesota’s political landscape, was among those who quit on Tuesday, according to three people with knowledge of the decision.
Mr. Thompson’s resignation came after senior Justice Department officials pressed for a criminal investigation into the actions of the widow ofRenee Nicole Good, the Minneapolis woman killed by an ICE agent on Wednesday.
Mr. Thompson, 47, a career prosecutor, objected to that approach, as well as to the Justice Department’s refusal to include state officials in investigating whether the shooting itself was lawful, the people familiar with his decision said.
Read that again. Senior DOJ officials pressed for a criminal investigation into the widow. The woman whose wife was just murdered by a federal agent. That’s what prompted career prosecutors to walk out the door.
And Thompson wasn’t alone. The Times reports that Harry Jacobs (Thompson’s deputy on the fraud cases), Melinda Williams (who ran the criminal division and successfully prosecuted sex traffickers and fentanyl dealers), and Thomas Calhoun-Lopez (chief of violent and major crimes) all quit as well.
The Minnesota U.S. Attorney’s Office wasn’t the only place seeing an exodus.
According to MS Now, at least six leaders of the Criminal Section of the Civil Rights Division—the unit that’s supposed to investigate police killings—also resigned in protest:
Top leaders of the criminal section of the Civil Rights Division have left their jobs to register their frustration with the department after the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon decided not to investigate the ICE officer’sfatal shooting of Renee Goodlast week.The criminal section of the division would normally investigateany fatal shooting by a law enforcement officer and specializes in probing potential or alleged abuse or improper use of force by law enforcement.
The departures – including that of the chief of the section, as well as the principal deputy chief, deputy chief and acting deputy chief – represent the most significant mass resignation at the Justice Department since February.
So we potentially have twelve or more DOJ officials walking out the door because of how this administration is handling a single case. Career prosecutors who spent years working for the DOJ and at least a year under this administration. People who had no apparent problem with everything else this DOJ has been doing. But investigating a murder victim while protecting her killer was apparently the line they couldn’t cross.
Let me say it plainly: when career prosecutors who’ve stuck around through a year of this administration’s chaos decide this is the moment to quit, it tells you something important about just how far outside normal law enforcement practice this has gone.
Also, remember why ICE supposedly flooded Minneapolis in the first place? Daycare fraud. A viral video from a small-time MAGA grifter claiming day cares were running scams, which the administration used to justify what it called “the largest immigration enforcement operation in history.”
And who was the lead prosecutor on those fraud cases? Joe Thompson. The same guy who just quit because the DOJ would rather investigate a murder victim’s activist connections than the agent who killed her.
As Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara put it to the NY Times:
“When you lose the leader responsible for making the fraud cases, it tells you this isn’t really about prosecuting fraud,”
No shit.
If you want evidence of just how upside-down the Justice Department’s priorities have become, look no further than what they’re actually investigating. A separate Times report from Sunday laid out how the FBI’s inquiry into the shooting is focused not on the agent’s actions, but on Good’s “possible connections to activist groups“:
The decision by the F.B.I. and the Justice Department to scrutinize Ms. Good’s activities and her potential connections to local activists is in line with the White House’s strategy of deflecting blame for the shooting away from federal law enforcement and toward opponents they have described as domestic terrorists, often without providing evidence.
Let’s summarize again: an ICE agent murders a woman in broad daylight. The division specifically designed to investigate when cops kill people has decided not to investigate the murderer. Instead, the DOJ is being told to investigate the dead woman and her widow’s social media connections.
And long term DOJ officials are rushing out the door, wanting absolutely nothing to do with any of this nonsense.
Meanwhile, Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon was busy on social media retweeting posts warning people not to “ram ICE officers” because they’ll use deadly force—you know, completely prejudging the case she’s supposed to be overseeing. As former DOJ domestic terrorism counsel Thomas Brzozowski put it to the NY Times:
“It’s not appropriate for officials to characterize this incident as domestic terrorism before the investigation is complete,” said Thomas E. Brzozowski, the former counsel for domestic terrorism in the Justice Department’s national security division. “There used to be a process, deliberate and considered, to figure out if behavior could be legitimately described as domestic terrorism.”
“And when it’s not followed,” Mr. Brzozowski said, “then the term becomes little more than a political cudgel to bash one’s enemies.”
“There used to be a process.” Past tense. That’s where we are now.
The administration’s approach makes sense only if you understand that the goal was never justice—it was narrative control. The White House needs Good to be a terrorist, not a victim, because acknowledging that an ICE agent murdered an unarmed American citizen for no reason undermines everything they’ve been saying about their immigration crackdown. So they investigate the victim. They investigate the widow. They investigate the “activist groups.” Anything but investigate the guy who actually pulled the trigger.
Former Trump attorney and current Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche’s statement was revealing: “there is currently no basis for a criminal civil rights investigation into the ICE agent.”
No basis. A federal agent shot an unarmed woman multiple times in the head. Video shows her trying to drive away, not toward officers. And there’s “no basis” for investigation. There’s a reason why every time a Trump legal move is flailing around, Blanche seems to show up and wave his arms theatrically yelling “nothing to see here folks.”
What would constitute a basis, exactly? Does the agent need to announce “I am now violating this person’s civil rights” before pulling the trigger?
Minnesota officials aren’t buying it. Governor Tim Walz called Thompson “a principled public servant” and added that his resignation is “the latest sign Trump is pushing nonpartisan career professionals out of the justice department, replacing them with his sycophants.” Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey called the resigned prosecutors “heroes” and the people pushing to prosecute Good’s widow “monsters.”
Drew Evans, superintendent of the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension—the state agency that normally investigates police shootings and which the DOJ has deliberately excluded from this investigation—put it simply:
“We’re losing a true public servant,” said Mr. Evans. “We really need professional prosecutors.”
The absence of a credible and comprehensive investigation into Ms. Good’s killing stands to “undermine trust in our public safety agencies,” Mr. Evans added.
We’re well past that point. When the Justice Department investigates murder victims while shielding their killers, “trust” has already been destroyed.
The mass resignations tell us something crucial: there are still at least a few people inside the system who know the difference between law enforcement and state-sanctioned murder. Though, it raises the question of whether there’s anyone left who knows that distinction.
Thompson and his colleagues apparently decided they’d rather walk away from careers they spent decades building than participate in the investigation of a grieving widow while her wife’s killer walks free.
But their departures also mean the fraud cases—the ones the administration claimed justified this whole Minneapolis operation—are now in serious jeopardy. The prosecutor who knew every defendant, every transaction, who’d built those cases from the ground up over years, just walked out the door. If the administration actually cared about prosecuting fraud in Minnesota, they’d be begging Thompson to stay. Instead, they drove him out because protecting an ICE agent from accountability matters more to them than the stated reason they sent ICE to Minneapolis in the first place.
Renee Nicole Good was murdered by her own government. And the Justice Department’s response was to investigate her.
We’ve always known the ultimate goal was to subject everyone to biometric collections, whether it’s at border crossings or international airports. At some point, the tech will move inland and become an annoying part of traveling from Point A to B because national security or whatever the fuck.
The acceleration was a bit more limited during the Biden years, but the desire to turn everyone into data points for government exploitation remained. Now that Trump is back in office, what was previously used to track inherently suspicious foreigners (that would be all the ones that aren’t white) will soon be used to track everyone.
This was first pitched by the DHS back in November, as “Papers Please” reports. Public comments are being accepted, but probably not being welcomed unless they’re sufficiently congratulatory of this expansion of surveillance power. Here’s what Papers Please has to say about it in its recent post:
As part of an array of proposals and rules issued by components of the US Department of Homeland Security to collect a widening array of biometric information and systems from widening categories of individuals, US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) is proposing a new rule that would authorize collection of any form of biometric information or samples from anyone, including US citizens, “encountered” by USCIS or “associated with” any applicant for admission to the US, US residency, or US citizenship.
The proposed rule would give USCIS blanket authority, at its discretion, to order any such individual to report to any location worldwide specified by USCIS, and to submit to collection of facial images (“digital image, specifically for facial recognition”), fingerprints, palm prints, iris scans, retinal scans, voice prints, and/or DNA samples.
“Associated with” is a pretty broad term — one that could cover any business employing foreigners or any school accepting applicants with student visas. And that’s not Papers Please editorializing the DHS/USCIS proposal. That’s a direct quote of its Federal Register posting:
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) proposes to amend its regulations governing biometrics use and collection. DHS proposes to require submission of biometrics by any individual, regardless of age, filing or associated with an immigration benefit request, other request, or collection of information, unless exempted; expand biometrics collection authority upon alien arrest; define ‘‘biometrics;’’ codify reuse requirements; codify and expand DNA testing, use and storage; establish an ‘‘extraordinary circumstances’’ standard to excuse a failure to appear at a biometric services appointment; modify how VAWA self-petitioners and T nonimmigrant status applicants demonstrate good moral character; and clarify biometrics collection purposes.
This means family members, friends, immigration lawyers, and the above-mentioned schools and businesses could all be expected to submit their biometric information to the DHS. There’s also the weird thing about “good moral character,” which presumably means someone’s character aligns with the current MAGA leadership, no matter its evident lack of good moral character. It also seeks to codify stuff it’s already doing and expand its power to do more of that same stuff elsewhere for other reasons and under other conditions.
The laundry list of people expected to bring their eyeballs, faces, and fingerprints to the DHS is described in a bit more detail later in the DHS proposal:
Using biometrics for identity verification and management will assist DHS’s efforts to combat trafficking, confirm the results of biographical criminal history checks, and deter fraud. Therefore, DHS proposes in this rule that any applicant, petitioner, sponsor, supporter, derivative, dependent, beneficiary, or individual filing or associated with a benefit request or other request or collection of information, including U.S. citizens, U.S. nationals and lawful permanent residents, and without regard to age, must submit biometrics unless DHS otherwise exempts the requirement.
If you ask me, this is less about a hunger for data than an attempt to dissuade people from assisting migrants, students, or temporary laborers from seeking a path to permanent residence. Our immigration processes have left us largely unaffected by terrorists or international criminal cartels, despite the government’s persistent (and consistently louder) claims otherwise. A vast majority of immigrants are hardworking, tax-paying people who commit fewer crimes than US citizens.
Then there’s this, which says the DHS will now be allowed to track/reject/kick out applicants based on their sexual identity:
Similarly, under this rule, DHS may expressly require, request, or accept raw DNA or DNA test results (which include a partial DNA profile) as evidence to determine eligibility for immigration and naturalization benefits or to perform any other functions necessary for administering and enforcing immigration and naturalization laws. For example, DHS may request DNA evidence to prove or disprove an individual’s biological sex in instances where that determination will impact benefit eligibility.
Neat. As if this whole shit show needed any more Nazi added to it. As was noted above, the public has been invited to comment on this proposal. But I can almost guarantee you the opposition will be ignored in favor of ensuring the GOP has a Fatherland to rule for the foreseeable future.
