No One Is Safe From DHS
The rights you thought you had effectively no longer exist
Since the Homeland Security Act was passed on the heels of the Patriot Act, the portions of the Constitution that protect civil liberties are weaker than ever. With the advent of broad data collection, law enforcement agencies can now obtain information about you without seeking a warrant. These powers impact all civilians in the U.S., and in many cases, abroad as well.
Local, state, and federal agencies all employ questionable and illegal tactics, in addition to the broad networks created by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Fusion Centers, which conduct “information sharing that cannot be accomplished by DHS or the federal government alone,” according to a document authored under former DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas in 2022. The agency surveils citizens and noncitizens alike.
Examining individual cases, such as that of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, underscores the dangers of these information-sharing networks. Abrego Gracia, like so many Black, Latino, and Indigenous U.S. citizens, was falsely labeled a gang member due to his attire and tattoos that have little or nothing to do with gangs and everything to do with cultural and racial identity.
The same gang databases that have been weaponized against nonwhite communities for decades were employed to target Abrogo Garcia among hundreds of others subjected to the torturous, inhumane conditions in ICE facilities, and CECOT, the El Salvadorian “terrorist” prison. The largely false information in these databases is now shared with the federal government by local and state police and vice versa, thanks in large part to Fusion Centers.
The same tools used to disproportionately label people as criminals (for something a simple as knowing someone who’s also been labeled) helped fuel the mass incarceration machine. This is how they ensnared Abrego Garcia and many more before him. The biggest problem with these databases falls on those who feed information into them. Racist cops and federal agents will take anything worn by a single suspect and input that data as “gang-related,” so they can label others as gang members later.
A 2023 report exposed how Black people and Latinos are 15 times more likely to be labeled as gang members than White people who self-identify as gang members.
“The gang label has been so highly racialized that white people who self-identify as gang members are almost never categorized as ‘gang members’ by law enforcement, while Black and Latino people who are not gang members are routinely labeled and targeted as if they were.”
The report also highlights how 99% of people in the New York Police Department’s gang database and 96% of those listed in Chicago’s are Latino or Black. Meanwhile, 98% of those who have been sentenced to prison with gang sentencing enhancements in Los Angeles County are nonwhite. In Mississippi, the Association of Gang Investigators reported that 53% of gang members in the state are white, but everyone arrested under the state’s gang law between 2010 and 2017 was Black. The federal government now operates on these same standards.
When the Trump administration goes into cities like Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and Chicago, claiming everyone is a violent gang member, this is the data they are relying on. It didn’t come out of nowhere, and they’re intentionally weaponizing it despite the broad denunciation of the tactics over the last two decades due to the tremendous amount of harm it causes to Black and Latino communities.
This makes the White House’s actions implicitly and intentionally racist, as noted by the constant hateful rhetoric from various members of the administration.
Labeling protesters, activists, and civil rights movements as terrorists isn’t new either. What the Trump administration is doing now reeks of COINTELPRO (Counter-Intelligence Program) in the 1960s and 1970s. The program targeted civil rights leaders and their friends and family while also targeting the Black Panther Party, the United Farm Workers, the Young Lords Party, and the entirety of the Civil Rights Movement. More recently, the FBI labeled Black Lives Matter protesters and leaders as Black Identity Extremists in 2017, using the label as justification to track and document everything civilians say and do.
The Trump administration is doing this again with its new National Security Presidential Memorandum (NSPM-7) issued on September 25. The memo targets so-called anti-American, anti-capitalist, anti-Christian, and anti-fascist speech while also targeting speech that shows “support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.” In essence, anything that doesn’t center on white Christian Nationalism is targeted as terroristic speech, putting the vast majority of the country at risk.
The broad wording is such that it can even be used against conservatives who aren’t 100% on board with the Trump administration. Language such as “to investigate and disrupt networks, entities, and organizations that foment political violence so that law enforcement can intervene in criminal conspiracies before they result in violent political acts” reeks of previous government actions to target civil and human rights movements.
The difference now is that the U.S. government has an agency with much broader powers than at any time in previous history. DHS and its child agencies, such as Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), have extensive surveillance and enforcement powers stemming from their mandates related to the border, immigration enforcement, and combating transnational crime.
Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), a branch of ICE, and CBP, employs a vast network of federally and privately owned databases. This allows them to collect and maintain millions of data points, including personal information, location history (from cell phone records, for example), vehicle data, and social media posts, for the purpose of identifying and tracking targets. Those databases are extensive and have been in use for more than two decades. While some surveillance activities (non-consensual electronic interceptions) outside of public areas typically require a court order, they skirt the courts when in public areas, where they argue there isn’t an expectation of privacy.
However, a 2023 report from the DHS Office of the Inspector General exposed how ICE has failed to adhere to the law and DHS’s internal policies regarding surveillance when using cell site simulators. These cell site simulators, known as Stingrays, are also used by local and state police. The report also highlighted how HSI used administrative subpoenas to collect a trove of financial records from Western Union in several states, records from a youth soccer league in Texas, student elementary school records in Georgia, and illegally acquired surveillance footage from an abortion provider in Illinois.
Another report pointed out how ICE has access to the utility records of 218 million people across all 50 states through Thomson Reuters. HSI also collaborates with several local, state, and federal agencies to gain access to troves of personal data. DHS agencies also have access to TECS, a CBP records system where information can originate from other law enforcement agencies, the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Database, the DHS Enforcement Integrated Database (EID), and bulk DMV data, which includes addresses, photos, and driver’s license numbers.
Another 2025 report highlighted just how much driver’s license data ICE has. ICE used facial recognition to scan the driver’s license photos of 1 in 3 adults and has access to the driver’s license data of 3 in 4 adults, exposing just how broad DHS’s surveillance powers are. DHS’s sweeping authority has been utilized domestically against civilians since its inception in 2003, and continues to do so. While it may have been more covertly used against civilians under previous administrations, the Trump administration is being much more overt.
As we witness the Trump administration target and detain citizens and noncitizens alike, even shooting several and killing them on many occasions and through various means, when it comes to surveillance by the agencies committing these atrocities, no one is safe. Anyone can be targeted for their speech online, for protesting against the police state, or for organizing against fascism. It may be Trump’s White House now, but many other presidents allowed this to happen, and ending it will require more than electing the next president or the next tranche of lawmakers (if voters get the chance to do so).
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Somehow, what you are saying rings true. I think what makes all of this surveillance over decades seem ominous now is that we are seeing retribution enacted. Currently, the main targets are non-white. If white skinned people brush this off, assuming they will not also be targets, they are either naive or racist. Trump has made it quite clear where his loyalty lies. It is not with middle-class Americans.
Connecting the dots with this and coverage of updated surveillance techniques reported by Wired makes you really think about what is effective resistance.