DHS Is Expanding Domestic Surveillance While Targeting Efforts to Document and Dissent

Early last week, an unassuming image spread quickly across social media, spurred by reporting from local Minnesota news outlets. It’s a picture of a small boy wearing a blue knit hat decorated with cute eyes, a little nose and floppy ears that move if you pull the pom poms dangling down to his shoulders. Five-year-old Liam Ramos had just returned home from school, so he’s still wearing his Spiderman backpack. It’s too big for him in the way that every kindergartner’s backpack looks endearingly oversized.

In the photo, a man dressed all in black, whose face is out of frame, is gripping Liam’s backpack. The man isn’t Liam’s dad, who had just brought his son home from school, but an unnamed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent.

We know what happened before and after this photo because community members immediately alerted one another that ICE agents were in the process of detaining Liam and his father in their driveway. Zena Stenvik, the superintendent of Liam’s Minneapolis school district, drove straight to the Ramos family home when she heard. Speaking to The Guardian, she described an ICE agent leading Liam to the front door and directing him to knock and ask to be let in — “essentially using a five-year-old as bait.” Vice President J.D. Vance has publicly defended ICE’s abduction of Liam and his father, claiming that “the five-year-old was not arrested” and lying about Liam’s father’s immigration status.

Over the weekend, another piece of media from Minneapolis began rapidly circulating online — a video where the violence captured is even more immediately clear. Another video followed, and then another — all footage of the same moment when a community observer and ICU nurse, 37-year-old Alex Pretti, moved from recording an increasingly aggressive Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) agent to shielding two people that the agent had begun assaulting. Federal agents then swarmed Alex, pinned him to the ground and killed him after firing their guns 10 times in five seconds.

We know all of this because of community members who, just like Alex, kept filming.

A campaign of terror from ICE and CBP

As I write this, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is waging an all-out assault on the people of Minneapolis. ICE and CBP agents — all of whom fall under DHS’ umbrella — have killed, blinded, abducted and terrorized Minnesotans of every age and immigration status, including U.S. citizens and a six-month old who had to be hospitalized after ICE agents gassed his family’s car.

Like community members in other cities the federal government has occupied and terrorized in the past year, Minnesotans are organizing. They’re bringing groceries to neighbors too fearful to leave their homes, standing guard during school drop-off and dismissals, and — critically — monitoring and documenting the activities of ICE and CBP agents in their neighborhoods.

The Trump administration has responded to this last tactic in particular with escalating violence. DHS agents are now threatening community members for exercising their constitutional right to observe and record government activities in public. Videos community observers have captured in Minnesota show agents invoking the fatal ICE shooting of Renee Good in early January as a threat — and photographing ICE observers’ license plates to add to a “nice little database” of “domestic terrorist[s].” 

At the same time, DHS is busy expanding its own sprawling, invasive web of surveillance. The agency is tapping into corporate surveillance infrastructure like license-plate reader Flock, which partnered with Amazon’s Ring in late 2025. DHS is also centralizing access to highly sensitive, previously siloed data collected by agencies like the Social Security Administration and the Internal Revenue Service to track citizens and immigrants alike. 

The end goal is clear: expanding DHS’ capacity to track, target and terrorize communities, while working to chill and criminalize community-led efforts to document what’s really happening — and fight back. 

The domestic surveillance empire

Building an unprecedented, 21st-century surveillance apparatus has been central to DHS’ mission since Congress created the agency in the wake of the 9/11 attacks — when it promptly began surveilling Muslim communities across the country. Since then, the agency has also spied on immigrant justice, racial justice and environmental activists, from monitoring the social-media accounts of Black Lives Matter organizers to tracking anti-ICE protests under the first Trump administration. 

Increasingly, DHS is weaponizing the full weight of its multibillion-dollar surveillance infrastructure against communities the Trump administration is targeting for explicitly political reasons. Since December 2025, DHS has trained its terror campaign on Minnesota — led by former Democratic Vice Presidential candidate Tim Walz — and Minneapolis, a city Rep. Ilhan Omar represents in Congress. She and the city’s large Somali diaspora community are both frequent targets of openly racist attacks from Trump and his allies.

DHS has bought and deployed a wide array of surveillance technologies in the past. According to research by Georgetown Law School’s Center on Privacy & Technology, ICE alone spent an estimated $2.8 billion on “new surveillance, data collection, and data-sharing programs” between 2008 and 2021. In 2024, DHS signed a $2 million contract with Paragon, an Israeli spyware company whose tools government actors are using to target journalists and human-rights activists across the world. In April, ICE spent $30 million on a deal with surveillance firm Palantir that included software called ImmigrationOS to help track and target people who may have overstayed visas. According to 404 Media’s reporting, Palantir is currently building a tool to map the addresses of potential targets for deportation that includes “a dossier on each person, and provides a ‘confidence score’ on the person’s current address.” 

ICE is already deploying a range of new surveillance tools as it storms neighborhoods and harasses community observers from Minneapolis to Chicago and elsewhere. The agency bought access to a tool called Webloc, developed by PenLink, that enables the real-time and continuous tracking of mobile devices in a neighborhood using commercial location data collected on hundreds of millions of phones. DHS agents have also been using a new app called Mobile Fortify to subject anyone within reach of their phones’ cameras to facial-recognition technology that agents then use to judge someone’s citizenship status — regardless of documentation to the contrary. Internal DHS guidance documents assert that no one can opt out of being scanned by the app — and the agency is storing photos agents capture using the app for 15 years. 

ICE has also expanded its social-media surveillance capabilities with its purchase of multiple tools that allow it to build online dossiers of anyone with a public social-media presence — continuously tracking individuals’ online activity across platforms, including marketplaces and search engines. Internal contracting documents Wired reviewed in late 2025 indicate that ICE has plans to “build out a 24/7 social media surveillance team.”

Meanwhile, the agency is indirectly plugging into commercial surveillance technologies through local law enforcement. Flock, a company that has blanketed the United States with cameras to track license plates, and Ring, the Amazon-owned doorbell-camera company, both claim that they don’t work with ICE — but 404 Media reporting has revealed that local law-enforcement officers are routinely conducting searches of Flock’s data on behalf of ICE. Ring announced its partnership with Flock in October 2025. 

The day before DHS agents shot and killed Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, ICE filed a public request for information about how it can use new “commercial Big Data and Ad Tech” tools — and, in particular, “location data services” — in ICE operations. 

Watching the watchers

DHS’ aggressive efforts to expand the already-invasive tendrils of its surveillance apparatus are matched only by the Trump administration’s push to ensure the public has no independent insight into the activities of ICE or CBP. As I wrote in late 2025, the Department of Justice was quick to pressure tech companies like Apple and Google to weaponize their gatekeeping roles as mobile app-store operators to pull down apps that communities were using to crowdsource information on ICE raids — alleging that this information sharing put agents at danger, even as DHS was sending its own camera crews out on those same raids to produce social-media content. The tech giants proved eager to capitulate. 

On Jan. 16, the Federal Aviation Administration quietly published a new guidance banning drones from following or recording any DHS vehicles. The agency has a track record of using drones to surveil protests: In 2025, the agency even flew Predator drones over anti-ICE protests in Los Angeles. 

A cadre of Trump appointees, including Attorney General Pam Bondi, has made it equally clear that they will shield the agency at all costs. Instead of prosecuting ICE agents for murder, disappearing people and lying under oath, Trump’s Department of Justice is broadcasting plans to go after ICE’s critics — including journalists — and the victims of ICE’s violence. Six federal prosecutors in Minnesota have resigned over the Justice Department’s efforts to launch a criminal investigation into Becca Good, who was recording the ICE officers who threatened and then fatally shot her wife Renee.

For the past year, administration officials have used the rhetoric of “domestic terrorism” to describe any opposition to its agenda and, in particular, to communities’ efforts to protect their neighbors by documenting federal agents’ activities — as Alex Pretti was doing moments before DHS agents killed him. Within hours of his death, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem were both on social media and in front of the press calling him a domestic terrorist, too. 

In a statement expressing their heartbreak and anger, Alex’s parents, Michael and Susan Pretti, said:

“The sickening lies told about our son by the administration are reprehensible and disgusting.

“ … He had his phone in his right hand and his empty left hand [was] raised above his head while trying to protect the woman ICE just pushed down, all while being pepper sprayed. 

“Please get the truth out about our son. He was a good man.”

Document and dissent

Resisting this escalating campaign of surveillance and violence is a collective project.

There are important steps people can take to secure their devices and communications with each other, to minimize their digital footprints or to opt out of using commercial surveillance technologies. But these individual efforts will not be enough if your local police department has a Flock contract, or your neighbors have a Ring camera, or if the Trump administration continues to share government-held personal data with ICE.

Similarly, there are important legal interventions that can — and in some states, do — restrict law-enforcement access to surveillance technologies, or from using those technologies to track and target people without a judicial warrant. States could ban the sale of location data, which makes surveillance tools like Webloc possible, or the widespread harvesting of our sensitive personal data, which made Palantir’s rise possible. Congress could ban the sale of any data to law enforcement that would otherwise require a warrant to access. Courts can curtail federal agencies’ sharing of sensitive data.

But all of this still assumes that the government will respect policies and laws put in place to guard against abuse and enforce the constitutional rights of every person — regardless of immigration status — in the United States. Trump-administration officials are turning DHS agents’ willingness to flaunt existing legal guardrails into social-media fodder. 

Mutual aid, dogged local and independent reporting, and community-defense infrastructures like ICE Watch are all tools that build power exactly where surveillance and state violence attempt to stifle it. As the people of Minneapolis — and Chicago, Los Angeles, D.C. and elsewhere across the country — are demonstrating every day, the best answer to this onslaught against our communities is solidarity.

Help Free Press keep working to rein in domestic surveillance: Donate today.