The Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law reported Sunday that “the Trump administration openly says that it will use its domestic spying capabilities to target people who oppose ICE’s actions. And ICE has been bulking up on the latest surveillance technology.”
The nonprofit law and public policy organization provided a link to its article ‘ICE Wants to Go After Dissenters as well as Immigrants,’ which claims “ICE has powerful tools to crack down on people opposing the administration’s policies. It can trawl the internet for people holding anti-ICE views. It can track the locations where protesters and activists gather and identify their networks of friends and family. It can identify protesters using facial recognition. It may even be able to hack into phones.”
The warnings of what’s coming really could not be any clearer https://t.co/5FZZQmrnqr
— Max Fisher (@Max_Fisher) December 1, 2025
The New York Times journalist Max Fisher responded to the report by writing on social media: “The warnings of what’s coming really could not be any clearer.”
Note: On Thanksgiving Day, President Trump announced that he will “permanently pause migration from all Third World Countries” and “remove anyone who is not a net asset to the United States, or is incapable of loving our Country” and “denaturalize migrants who undermine domestic tranquility.”
Promising to mass expel legal residents simply for belonging to demographic groups deemed to “undermine domestic tranquility” is straightforwardly Naziism, and if you think US citizens aren’t next you’re delusional. pic.twitter.com/iywmukYATC
— Max Fisher (@Max_Fisher) November 28, 2025
Fisher responded, “Promising to mass expel legal residents simply for belonging to demographic groups deemed to ‘undermine domestic tranquility’ is straightforwardly Naziism, and if you think US citizens aren’t next you’re delusional.”
Fisher’s speculation has precedent in Trump’s own comments in the Oval Office in April. Speaking with El Salvador President Nayib Bukele, whose prisons held people deported by the Trump administration, Trump told Bukele during a livestreamed conversation that “homegrown criminals next.” Encouraging Bukele to construct more prisons, Trump followed up saying, “Homegrowns are next, the homegrowns. You gotta build about five more places.”
Forbes reported in September that “ICE has spent over $5 million on social media and dark web monitoring software that critics say enables warrantless surveillance.”
That spend included a contract for an AI-powered social media surveillance tech called Tangles, developed by Cobwebs Technology, a tech concern founded by Israeli cyber intelligence veterans and acquired by PenLink in 2023. Tangles “scours the open internet and the dark web for information relevant to police investigations with AI tying together data on people of interest.”