Protect Your Brothers and Sisters
Towards an understanding of current U.S. Government McCarthy era tactics directed against foreign born pro-Palestine student activists in a high-tech surveillance era
D.H.S. Cited Foreign Students’ Writings and Protests Before Their Arrests
Documents unsealed by a federal judge on Thursday include dossiers that investigators prepared on pro-Palestinian student activists before they were targeted for deportation.
“… While it is possible the government collected other information about the students, the records represent the information that the government presented to Judge Young to explain why the students were chosen for arrest.
“The dossiers sent to the State Department were compiled by a specialized “tiger team” in the Homeland Security Investigations arm within Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The investigations unit has traditionally looked into serious crime like human trafficking, as well as national security cases.
“Peter Hatch, an official tasked with overseeing the effort, testified during the trial last summer that the team had rushed a review of more than 5,000 students linked to pro-Palestinian demonstrations, sending their findings to Mr. Rubio’s staff for review. According to his testimony, the team’s work was also informed by reviewing lists of names compiled by at least two websites — the Canary Mission and Betar US — which identify and publish the personal information of pro-Palestinian protesters.”
-By Zach Montague
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/22/us/politics/trump-rubio-student-speech.html
The use of private watchdog sites like Canary Mission to inform federal investigations is troubling on multiple levels. Those platforms have been critized for conflating legitimate activism with extremism, and seeing them used as an official soruce for targeting students raises obvious due process concerns. The fact that it took a federal judge unsealing these documents to even know this was happenign shows how opaque these processes have become.