Mother JonesModify

2026-03-05 05:46:25

Without providing clear guidance on how to do so or how it will help, the United States government is advising Americans abroad to depart immediately from 14 countries, including Saudi Arabia, Israel, and Qatar, as its deadly offensive in Iran continues. 

Americans abroad remain stuck in place. Thousands of flights have been cancelled and there’s uncertainty surrounding which airspaces will be safe, and when.

New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand told Mother Jones that President Donald Trump “has essentially told the thousands of citizens who are stuck in the Middle East because of a war he started that they are on their own.” Gillibrand, a Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee and the Senate Intelligence Committee, called the administration’s actions “completely unacceptable and downright disgraceful.” 

Sen. Gillibrand has criticized US actions in the region, saying in a statement on Saturday that, “America voted for lower costs, not forever wars.” She said she’s working with New Yorkers currently in the region to get back to the state.

Since the US and Israel initially launched strikes in Iran earlier this week, Americans in the region have been trying to flee a war that has already resulted in hundreds of deaths. Counterstrikes by Iran, and fear of future strikes, have led the US to close multiple embassies in the region. Others are operating with limited staff—giving Americans even less support as they try to find a way to the states. 

When Trump was asked about why there wasn’t a plan for stranded Americans prior to the decision to strike Iran, he said, “well, because it happened all very quickly.”

The State Department has been pointing stranded citizens to a phone number. Yet, the message callers heard hasn’t been providing clear help. As of Tuesday afternoon, according to the Washington Post, callers were told to “not rely on the U.S. government for assisted departure or evacuation at this time. There are currently no United States evacuation points.”

On Wednesday, Gillibrand sent a letter, shared with Mother Jones, to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, relaying the “dismay” her office has heard from Americans abroad and urging him to “respond no later than close of business tomorrow with the Administration’s plan to evacuate American citizens from the region.”

“The Trump administration just told Americans: ‘you’re on your own.”,” Gillibrand’s letter reads, referencing the State Department hotline. “When it comes to the safety of American citizens,” she continued, “‘you’re on your own’ is an unacceptable answer.”

2026-03-05 04:21:03

A progressive challenger who has embraced comparisons to NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani is narrowly trailing North Carolina incumbent Rep. Valerie Foushee in a contest that seems likely headed to a recount after Tuesday’s primary. Foushee currently leads Durham County Commissioner Nida Allam by about 2,200 votes in North Carolina’s 4th Congressional District, which encompasses deep-blue cities like Chapel Hill and Durham. Though Foushee seems likely to win at this point, the closeness of the race is a testament to the enduring divide between progressives and establishment Democrats, especially those who’ve supported Israel. Many observers saw it as an early referendum on the direction the party might take in the midterms. 

Allam, who has been endorsed by Sen. Bernie Sanders, has campaigned as a “true progressive” going against the grain of the “Democratic Party Establishment,” as she puts it. In 2020, she became the first Muslim woman elected to public office in North Carolina when she won a seat on the Durham County Board of Commissioners. She’s called for ICE to be abolished and for a moratorium on AI data centers.

Foushee hasn’t taken as strong a stance on ICE as her opponent, though she has called for the agency to be defunded. Foushee was the first African-American and the first woman to represent the district in Congress. She co-chairs the House Democratic Commission on AI and the Innovation Economy—a key point of contention in the race, considering there’s a data center proposal in the district. For the primary, Foushee earned endorsements from high-profile North Carolina Democrats, including US Senate candidate and former Gov. Roy Cooper and current Gov. Josh Stein. 

The winner of the NC-04 Democratic primary is almost guaranteed the seat in the House given the district’s history—Dems have held the seat for nearly 30 years. Tuesday’s primary is a rematch of 2022’s open primary for the seat, where Foushee overtook Allam 46 percent to 37 percent. 

Foushee’s positioning on Israel seems to be a key factor in the race’s closeness. In 2022, AIPAC and its affiliates pumped more than $2 million into Foushee’s primary campaign, and Foushee took an AIPAC-organized trip to Israel in March 2024. But in a town hall last August, after receiving heavy criticism from voters and local officials, Foushee walked her support of Israel back and said she wouldn’t accept AIPAC money for this latest congressional bid. After that town hall, Foushee signed on to co-sponsor the Block the Bombs act, which would prohibit the president from selling certain weapons to Israel. More recently, Foushee has also been a vocal opponent of US and Israeli attacks on Iran. 

Still, Allam hasn’t let voters forget Foushee’s previous ties to AIPAC or her ties to AI and defense companies. Indy Week reported more than $4.4 million in outside spending, making this North Carolina’s most expensive congressional primary ever. 

Though the race hasn’t been officially called, Foushee issued a statement last night declaring victory, while Allam has said she’ll call for a recount. In a post on X today, Foushee welcomed the possibility. “It is critical to our democracy that every lawful vote is counted,” Foushee wrote. 

2026-03-05 03:35:26

In her second day of hearings before Congress, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem refused during a House Judiciary Committee hearing Wednesday to acknowledge that federal agents have and continue to violently detain US citizens in Minnesota and across the country. Forget about that, Noem suggested—blame Democrats.

“Today [Democrats] are defending citizens because they know they shouldn’t be putting illegal aliens in front of citizens,” she said in response to Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.). “They realize that when they’re fighting for people who shouldn’t be in this country to begin with, that’s a losing statement with the American people.”

The observation came after Lofgren showed Noem three videos of federal agents forcibly dragging US citizens out of their cars and homes without judicial warrants or any suggestion of cause.

Lofgren asked Noem: “Do you train agents not to do that, or are they trained to do that?”

“If an individual doesn’t respond to verbal commands [from agents], then they go to soft techniques,” Noem said. She also addressed the lack of judicial warrants in DHS arrests, reiterating the agency’s position that it can administer its own warrants, claiming that the Supreme Court has recognized their validity.

Lofgren disagreed and said arrests of US citizens with only administrative warrants violate the Fourth Amendment, which guarantees “[t]he right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.”

“We’re fighting for American citizens, Madam Secretary, because your ICE agents shot them in the face and killed them,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), mentioning by name Renée Good and Alex Pretti, two US citizens who were killed in January by federal agents in Minneapolis.

Just hours after both killings, and before any investigation, Noem claimed that Good and Pretti had committed acts of “domestic terrorism,” and continued to do so after video evidence contradicted the assertion. 

“Were Renée Good and Alex Pretti domestic terrorists?” Raskin asked. Noem did not answer the question, but she later agreed with Raskin that it is unlawful for federal agents to shoot and kill an individual for engaging in peaceful protest, for filming them on a public street, for legally carrying a holstered firearm, or for driving away from them. 

“I hope you would rethink what you said about two good, honest, faithful American citizens and what that means to their families,” Raskin stated. 

But what my colleague Inae Oh wrote the day after federal agents killed Good continues to be true: “a disdain for facts” and a systemic defense of “ICE officers as they detain, terrorize, sometimes with gunfire, and then brag about it.” 

Good and Pretti’s deaths were “an absolute tragedy” and there are still “ongoing investigations,” Noem claimed. But the secretary isn’t rethinking her other statements—she’s doubling down on them.

2026-03-05 02:07:15

Get ready to hear a lot more about James Talarico. The Texas state representative won the Democratic US Senate primary on Tuesday, defeating Jasmine Crockett—a high-profile member of Congress representing Dallas—in a race that pitted two candidates with a knack for garnering attention and diverging theories of the electorate.

Talarico, who I recently profiled, is a former public school teacher and current seminary student who has built a following among Democrats inside and outside the state for his sermons and floor exchanges challenging Christian nationalism. Talarico will be an underdog heading into the general election. The race will be a reach, even if he ends up facing Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton—who has, after all, been elected in a cloud of scandal three times before. It will also be absurdly expensive; the tab for a competitive general election will easily exceed nine figures.

I wrote nine years ago that Beto O’Rourke could run the best campaign in Texas in decades and still lose by 5 percentage points. In 2018, he did—and lost by 2.6 points. But Trump is underwater and just blew up the life boat, and the situation for Democrats in the state is not as dire as it seemed a year ago. A state Senate candidate recently flipped a ruby-red district in a bellwether county, and he did it not just through a fluke of special-election turnout, but by peeling off Republican voters. In Talarico, Democrats have landed a well-funded candidate unsullied by doings in Washington—someone whose faith-based populism impressed Joe Rogan and Barack Obama and showed strength in the places the party has been hemorrhaging support. It may not be the situation Democrats need, but it is a situation Republicans absolutely didn’t want.

The semi-regular return of Lone Star Democratic optimism was only one part of the story last night—and maybe not even the most important one. Republicans are the ones who actually run the state, after all, and they are not okay. Fourth-term Sen. John Cornyn is hovering at about 42 percent in his primary, and will face Paxton, the scandal-plagued attorney general, in a May runoff. That Paxton—who had to take remedial ethics classes after being indicted for securities fraud, and was impeached by the Republican-dominated state House—is not just still in office but actively seeking a promotion is a testament to the power of the party’s Christian nationalist faction, and to the broader conservative movement’s principled rejection of consequences and shame. His attempt to overturn the 2020 election through a patently frivolous lawsuit (he spoke on the Mall on January 6) led to a state bar investigation. It’s worked out wonderfully for him.

You don’t dominate a state as Texas Republicans have without a keen, if cynical, understanding of the median voter. But further downballot, the results showed a party increasingly captured by a radical fringe. Take the race to replace Paxton as attorney general, which US Rep. Chip Roy entered with more name recognition than anyone else. Roy, a former Ted Cruz chief of staff, is a hard-right zealot (I do not think he would even consider that an insult), but also a kind of irascible figure in DC with a real and confounding code—he voted to certify the 2020 election results on January 6, for example. You could expect him to take on many of the same fights as Paxton, but without all the scuzziness. He faces a runoff after finishing 8 points behind state Sen. Mayes Middleton, who told voters that he had “defeated the atheists” and was “fighting Sharia law” while accusing Roy—Chip Roy!—of helping “illegals avoid deportation.”

Roy’s colleague in the US House, Rep. Tony Gonzales, is also facing a runoff in a rematch with Brandon Herrera, a gun influencer known as the “the AK guy.” Gonzales has called Herrera a “known neo-Nazi,” in reference to his opponent’s history of posting Nazi memes and Holocaust jokes. (Herrera has said he is not a neo-Nazi and that he simply has an “edgy” sense of humor.) Herrera has accused Gonzales of the far more serious offense of supporting modest gun-control legislation after the 2022 school shooting in Uvalde, which is in the district. But Gonzales may be on the ropes this time; he is now facing a congressional ethics inquiry over allegations he had an inappropriate relationship with a staffer, who later died by suicide. Another Republican incumbent, Rep. Dan Crenshaw, lost his race outright. Crenshaw was once a rising star, but drew opposition on the right for voting to certify the 2020 election, and working with Democrats on a failed border-security bill in 2024.

And then there’s Bo French, an oilman who until recently chaired the Republican party in Tarrant County, which includes Fort Worth, and who advanced to the runoff in the race for railroad commissioner—a powerful statewide office that regulates the energy industry. French ran just 4,000 votes short of the leader, Jim Wright, pulling nearly a third of the vote. French is a gleeful racist who has said that “we are all Rhodesians now” and called for Trump to “remove Third World subtards from America.” Last year he posted a poll on X that asked: “Who is a bigger threat to America?” The poll offered two choices: Jews or Muslims.

That’s the dynamic in the nation’s largest red state heading into the midterms. It is not ideal, for a pluralistic society, but it feels appropriate for 2026: a Democratic Party with maybe a puncher’s chance if its candidates do everything right—and a Republican base testing just how far gone it can go, before it ever pays a price for anything.

2026-03-05 01:51:26

On a recent Sunday afternoon, Arianne Betancourt stood across the road from the infamous Alligator Alcatraz immigrant detention camp that opened last year in Florida by the Everglades. Her 54-year-old Cuban father, Justo Betancourt, is among the roughly 1,500 immigrants detained there. 

Before her father’s arrest, Betancourt, a 33-year-old Miami native, spent her days guiding tourists through the city’s most iconic sites like Little Havana and South Beach. Now, she is holding a microphone and a bright orange sign that reads, “Give Justo Betancourt the right to due process.” She peered across the crowd of about 100. When she came to the weekly vigil for the first time, Betancourt told them she was “absolutely broken.” She then added, “Week after week, I’ve come here, and I’ve felt stronger. I feel love, I feel empathy, compassion from absolute strangers.”

For 31 consecutive weeks, hundreds have gathered at these vigils held outside Alligator Alcatraz, hastily erected by the DeSantis administration in July to house immigrants swept into Trump’s deportation machine. The facility has detained thousands of people since its opening despite a long trail of reports of harsh conditions and a federal lawsuit that has challenged the legality of the detention camp’s opening within the environmentally protected area of Big Cypress National Preserve. Oral arguments in the case are scheduled for April 7.

By now, Betancourt has become a regular presence at the vigils. She hopes that her advocacy will help free her father and other immigrants. Justo Betancourt received an order of removal following his release from prison in 2020 after serving time for drug-related charges. Immigration authorities required him to report to an ICE office in South Florida for yearly check-ins. Then, in July, ICE told him to report every three months. That change troubled Arianne, who was following the news of the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigrants. “I was already mentally preparing myself for the worst outcome,” she recalled, even though family members and friends in Miami didn’t understand why she was so concerned. “I was just like, no, you guys are not paying attention. You’re not seeing the bigger picture. Just because we’re not seeing ICE do the raids that they’re doing elsewhere, it doesn’t mean that they’re not coming for people here, too.”

And indeed, during a routine immigration check-in appointment in October, ICE officers arrested him. Betancourt soon began attending vigils outside Alligator Alcatraz, spoke to local news outlets about her father’s case, and traveled to ICE protests in Chicago and Minneapolis. Just this week, she attended US Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s testimony at a Senate oversight hearing. As Noem left the chamber, Betancourt and others held up photos of people held in immigration detention. She recently quit her tour guide job and was hired as an organizer by the Workers Circle, the organization that is coordinating the so-called Freedom Vigils. Over the past few months, she’s met about 30 families with loved ones in Alligator Alcatraz. Most don’t want to speak out because of the stigma associated with being an immigrant. 

“Every time I meet a family, I take on a sense of responsibility,” she said. “You don’t want to speak up, but I’ll speak up for you.”

During a summer of rapidly intensifying immigration raids across the country last year, when the Department of Homeland Security faced challenges in finding facilities to house immigrants pending their deportations, the administration of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis swiftly constructed an immigration detention center on a little-used airfield surrounded by wetlands. Crews brought in massive tents, generators, kitchen and restroom facilities, and industrial lighting. In a branding exercise that had become part of these facilities—such as Florida’s Deportation Depot and the Speedway Slammer in Indiana—the state dubbed it Alligator Alcatraz. By July, immigrant detainees were being sent there. Detainees are separated into chain-link fenced areas, each containing 32 beds and three toilets. 

Soon, reports of mosquito infestations, flooding, poor medical care, and lackluster food and limited water access inundated social media and news reports. Most of the detainees are from Latin America, according to the ACLU. Many, as the Miami Herald reported, do not have criminal records. The facility became the center of lawsuits that are continuing. Additionally, the state has spent hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to run the facility, and it remains unclear if the federal government will honor the state’s reimbursement request of $608 million, the Herald also reported.

In addition to the dire circumstances reported by detainees, they also have faced problems in their legal efforts to gain release. The ACLU sued federal and Florida officials in July after attorneys reported issues with seeing their clients, and the government’s failure to designate an immigration court that would accept filings from detainees. After the government finally designated an immigration court for Alligator Alcatraz detainees, a federal judge dismissed part of the lawsuit. The ACLU then filed an amended complaint in September with additional claims, including limited virtual visits and outgoing confidential calls between attorneys and their clients.

Attorneys were also required to submit clients’ documents for review by the facility, a practice that Eunice Cho, an ACLU senior attorney on the case, described as “patently unconstitutional.” At an evidentiary hearing in January, two men who had been detained at Alligator Alcatraz testified that they resorted to writing their attorneys’ phone numbers on the walls with bars of soap after guards refused to provide pen and paper, the Miami Herald reported. A decision on the ACLU case is pending. “What we’re asking for is something very basic: provide confidential outgoing legal calls in detention, make sure this information is posted to make sure detainees know it’s available, let attorneys come to the facility without scheduled visits,” Cho said. “It’s nothing out of the ordinary.”

Meanwhile, accounts of abuse have continued. In December, Amnesty International released a report that cited limited access to showers, stadium lights on 24 hours a day, and food and water of poor and limited quality. Other treatment “amounts to torture,” the report states, “including being put in the ‘box’, described as a 2×2 foot cage-like structure people are put in as punishment—sometimes for hours at a time, exposed to the elements with hardly any water—with their feet attached to restraints on the ground.” The US Department of Homeland Security and ICE did not respond to a request for comment on this report. In a written statement, a spokesperson for the Florida Division of Emergency Management, which runs Alligator Alcatraz, called the report “false.” “No guards are punishing detainees. Officers are highly trained and follow all federal and state detention protocols. Additionally, detainees have access to clean working facilities for hygiene and receive three meals per day.”

Florida’s resistance movement against the current climate of punishing immigration policies has not been as visible as that of other states like Minnesota and New York, where ICE raids in public places have fueled protests. In Florida, many arrests happen quietly, with thousands of people being detained through traffic stops and other interactions with police. Out of Florida’s roughly 400 law enforcement agencies, nearly 90 percent have entered into so-called 287(g) agreements that give local officers the authority to arrest and detain immigrants on behalf of ICE.

The weekly vigils outside Alligator Alcatraz are a testament to the deep opposition to these policies that exists in the state, said Noelle Damico, director of social justice with the Workers Circle, a Jewish social-justice organization that has taken the lead in coordinating the gatherings. People come from all over the state, she said, with buses leaving from Naples and Miami to make the 90-minute drive to the facility. There they gather on a sandy stretch of land outside the detention camp’s entrance, holding signs, “Stop Alligator Alcatraz,” “All People are Created Equal,” “Due Process For All.” Often, families of detainees attend and field calls from their loved ones, placed on speaker mode, and broadcast on a mic. “The feeling is one overall of power and of solidarity with one another,” Damico told me. “We cannot let these people be forgotten for one minute.”

The interest in the Workers Circle vigils has caught on in about 35 other communities across the country as well. “People see these vigils matter,” Damico told me. “They are a fundamental building block in the fight for democracy.”

Betancourt’s father has been in custody for more than 100 days. In January, he was transferred to a Texas detention center and then forced to present himself for deportation to Mexican authorities at the border. But due to his health problems, including diabetes, he was turned away, and ICE transferred him back to Alligator Alcatraz, where he remains. Betancourt acknowledges that her father’s past may prompt less sympathy for his detention compared to those without criminal histories. “Regardless, if they have a criminal record or not,” she told me, “they’re all being treated the same way.” In 2016, her father was convicted on drug charges and possession of a firearm (which he did not use, according to court filings in his case). He served four years in federal prison. When ICE issued its order for removal in 2020, Betancourt reported to his check-ins with immigration and was issued a work permit, court filings state.

He made mistakes, he went to prison, he did his time,” Betancourt told me. Since his release, he’s been a devoted father to his daughters and became a grandfather of a baby girl, she said. When Betancourt started her tour guide business, he cobbled together the cash he had and gave it to her to help her get started. During their phone calls, the father and daughter try to keep the conversation light, but details of his time in detention seep through. He is shackled by his hands and feet when he is in the medical unit. He sometimes does not eat enough to balance his insulin. He’s gone a week without a shower. An attorney recently filed a Habeas Corpus petition to have Justo released on the grounds that his removal order had expired. 

No matter what happens in her father’s case, Betancourt says she plans to continue working as an advocate. “As terrible as this whole situation has been, it led me to my purpose,” she said. “To what I want to spend the rest of my life doing.”

2026-03-05 01:31:13

When agents came to his workplace armed with guns, gas canisters, and artificial intelligence, Abdikafi Abdurahman Abdullahi, known as Kafi, fought back with quick wit and street smarts. The Somali American engineer-turned-Uber driver is one of the few people willing to speak publicly about being subjected to the Department of Homeland Security’s new facial recognition tool, Mobile Fortify, offering a preview of what routine facial recognition could look like on American streets.

Abdullahi was waiting for a fare in a Minneapolis airport rideshare lot January 7, just hours after Renée Good was shot and killed by federal agents elsewhere in the city. As he watched a video of her death on his phone, there was a knock on his car door. Outside stood roughly a dozen ICE agents, demanding proof of his citizenship. 

“I was like, oh, if they killed that young woman and she’s white, then they’re sending a message out, which is it’s game on for everybody,” Abdullahi said.

Abdullahi, who is Black and Muslim, refused to show his ID, arguing that he was being racially profiled. Instead, he began filming, and his unflappable, mischievous comebacks transformed his video into a viral sensation. 

As Abdullahi filmed, an agent told him, “I can hear you don’t have the same accent as me.” 

“So I should sound like a 6-foot white guy?” Abdullahi later joked. “It’s not possible scientifically.”

Abdullahi became a US citizen in 2016. He moved to the United States at 17 after his family fled Somalia during the civil war. He holds a mechanical engineering degree from Washington State University and recently began working as an Uber driver to help pay off his student loans.

At one point, then–Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino joined the officers encircling Abdullahi’s car, asking whether he was an “illegal alien.” Abdullahi jokingly responded that he might be “from another planet.”

“I knew what they were doing,” he said. “They were stalling me so that they could get more data.”

In video of the confrontation, an officer raises his cellphone and scans Abdullahi. He’s using Mobile Fortify, an app that allows officers to photograph a person’s face and immediately query DHS databases for matches against passport records, visa files, and border entry photos. 

But according to Abdullahi, Mobile Fortify misidentified him and pulled up a profile for someone named “Ali.” Facial recognition technology is notoriously error prone and has long been criticized for inaccuracies when identifying people of color. Mobile Fortify has been shrouded in secrecy, and DHS has not publicly disclosed its error rate. 

Officers attempted to scan Abdullahi again. By then, a small crowd of spectators had gathered and were also filming the confrontation as Abdullahi continued to heckle the agents. When officers were unable to positively identify Abdullahi, they eventually gave up and walked away.

DHS declined to answer questions about Abdullahi’s experience and his claim that he was racially profiled and misidentified.

I’ve been covering the surveillance technology industry for some time, with a particular focus on the human rights risks posed by unchecked facial recognition tools.

In 2023, while directing my documentary Your Face Is Ours about facial recognition firm Clearview AI for France 24, I filmed with border agents at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York. At the time, Francis J. Russo, director of field operations for US Customs and Border Protection’s New York office, insisted that the agency takes privacy concerns seriously and does not “store the data in our systems for US citizens for more than 12 hours.”

But that assurance stands in stark contrast with what court filings reveal about DHS’s Mobile Fortify app.

According to documents filed in a lawsuit by the state of Illinois and city of Chicago against DHS, the agency “retains all biometric information taken using the Mobile Fortify app, including that of US citizens, for 15 years.” 

Until recently, DHS had not publicly acknowledged the existence of Mobile Fortify. Journalist Joseph Cox reported on the app in June, but the agency did not confirm its deployment until January, when it quietly listed it in its 2025 AI Use Case Inventory. The inventory revealed that agents had been using the app in the field since May. It also showed the scope of the tool, noting that agents can use it to collect both fingerprints and iris scans.

The inventory also contained the first official confirmation that the app relies on technology developed by Japanese multinational corporation NEC. The company did not respond to a request for comment.

By the time DHS publicly disclosed the existence of Mobile Fortify, it already had been used more than 100,000 times since its launch, according to court filings.

DHS declined to answer detailed questions about how Mobile Fortify is being used. In a written statement, the agency said: “Mobile Fortify is a lawful law-enforcement tool developed under the Trump Administration to support accurate identity and immigration-status verification during enforcement operations.” 

Civil liberties advocates say Mobile Fortify marks a dramatic escalation.

“What we’ve never seen before this year is a law enforcement agency putting face recognition technology on law enforcement agents’ phones out in the community and giving them unchecked power to stop people, pull them off the street, and start scanning their faces,” said Nathan Freed Wessler, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union. “It is deeply dangerous. It’s irresponsible, it’s unprecedented, and it’s illegal.”

The ACLU recently filed a class-action lawsuit against DHS targeting a broad array of surveillance tactics. Hussen v. Noem alleges that agents are conducting suspicionless stops, warrantless arrests, and face scans based on perceived race and ethnicity.

Advocates like Wessler are now seeing facial recognition technology and other surveillance tools used not only to verify immigration status, but also to identify and track Americans who protest ICE or criticize the agency.

“This is taking a big and very scary step toward a kind of totalitarian checkpoint society that we have always professed to abhor here in the United States,” Wessler said.

A video recorded in Maine in January captured an ICE observer being filmed by an agent who told her that DHS had “a nice little database” and she was now “considered a domestic terrorist.”

“Documenting ICE activity and protesting against it is a right protected by the First Amendment,” Wessler said. “Retaliation for doing so goes against the Constitution.” 

In Minneapolis, protesters at the scene of Alex Pretti’s fatal shooting described what they see as an expanding digital dragnet. 

“It’s dystopian. It’s like Black Mirror stuff,” one masked protester told me. “They’re using facial recognition, every advanced tool that they have to try and identify protesters and squash what we’re doing.”

“It’s un-American,” another said.

In October, DHS quietly removed a Biden-era policy from its website that outlined oversight and privacy safeguards for facial recognition and other biometric tools. It has yet to publish a replacement framework clarifying what guardrails, if any, now govern their use. In early February, Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and other Democratic lawmakers announced the ICE Out of Our Faces Act to “stop this unaccountable, authoritarian use of facial recognition technologies.” 

DHS is now looking to consolidate its various facial recognition and fingerprint databases into a single biometric platform, according to recent reporting by Wired. And in February, reports emerged that data analytics firm Palantir landed a new five-year, $1 billion software purchase agreement with DHS. 

“We’ve seen DHS amassing a wide range of surveillance software. Some of it’s not new, but the way it’s being deployed is new,” Wessler said. “Cellphone location data harvested from apps on people’s phones, cellphone tracking tools called stingrays, license plate readers, social media monitoring software, and systems like Palantir that bring all of these together in one easily searchable place.”

Since Abdullahi’s video went viral, he has become something of a folk hero. Strangers recognize him in the street. Teenagers ask for selfies. Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) visited to thank him for his bravery. And a Norwegian Parliament member asked him to contribute to a video nominating the people of Minneapolis for the Nobel Peace Prize.

He has a message for President Donald Trump, who has been vocal about craving his own Peace Prize: Stop picking on Somali Americans.

“We don’t submit easily,” he said. “We’ve been through tyrants way worse.”