Feds Want to ID Instagram Users Who Named ICE Agents

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StopICE.net filed a motion to quash a subpoena about an Instagram video that identified a Border Patrol agent.

The day after StopICE.net put this post on Instagram, the Department of Homeland Security sent an administrative subpoena to Meta for information about StopICE.net’s account and others.

On September 2, StopICE.net shared a video on its Instagram account naming and shaming a Border Patrol agent who had been spotted at recent immigration raids in greater Los Angeles.

To the soundtrack of Z-Ro’s “Crooked Officer,” the post includes a montage of photos of a uniformed Border Patrol agent, some with a gaiter over the bottom half of his face and others with his face uncovered. In one photo, a visible name badge reads “G. Simeon.”

“Let’s welcome Georgy Simeon to the wall of shame,” reads the caption posted by Long Beach Rapid Response, a community defense group and one of six Instagram accounts tagged as “collaborators” on the video, along with StopICE.net, which has nearly 500,000 subscribers signed up for its crowdsourced alerts about immigration raids around the country.

The day after the post about Simeon, the Department of Homeland Security sent an administrative subpoena to Meta, the parent company of Instagram, for information about StopICE.net’s account and others.

Despite clear protections under the First Amendment for photographing agents in public, the Trump administration has threatened to prosecute activists for “doxing” immigration officers. In May, ICE stormed a home in Irvine, California, in an effort to track down a man they accused of hanging posters with agents’ names and other information. Now DHS is trying to unmask accounts that dare to share the names of masked federal agents.

On Thursday, the developer behind StopICE.net, under the pseudonym “John Doe,” asked a court to block the subpoena, through a motion to quash filed in federal court in San Francisco by lawyers from Civil Liberties Defense Center.

The DHS subpoena was issued “without lawful authority,” the motion alleges, since it was based on a legal provision focused on immigration enforcement, rather than criminal matters.

“Providing the information requested by the government in its subpoena would compromise the exercise of Doe’s fundamental rights by chilling his ability to freely associate with others as well as to engage in political speech in a public forum,” the motion argues.

“This is a patent, open attempt to chill free speech critical of the government,” said Matthew Kellegrew, an attorney with the Civil Liberties Defense Center, which filed the motion.

Hours later, another of the Instagram accounts targeted by DHS — Long Beach Protests and Events, which uses the handle @lbprotest and is suing under the pseudonym “J. Doe” — filed a separate motion to block the subpoena, represented by the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California.

“I am haunted by the possibility that the government will find out who I am using this subpoena,” J. Doe wrote in an affidavit. “I imagine armed agents smashing through the door of my home in the middle of the night.”

U.S Customs and Border Protection did not immediately reply to a request for comment about the motion to block the subpoena. In response to a request for comment, Meta referred The Intercept to a webpage about the company’s compliance with data demands.Sherman Austin, the developer behind StopICE.net, who is a U.S. citizen, doesn’t keep a particularly low profile. The Stop ICE Raids Alert Network website identifies Austin by name as the developer behind the project, and he’s given multiple interviews about his work. The group’s Instagram account also links to his personal handle.

But other accounts that collaborated on the video about Simeon, including Long Beach Rapid Response, are run anonymously.

Three days after the posting the video, Austin received an email from Meta’s Law Enforcement Response Team: “We have received legal process from law enforcement seeking information about your Instagram account.” The Instagram user who runs @lbprotest received a similar notice the same day, according to court filings.

At first, Meta did not tell them which agency was demanding information about their accounts or what the agents were after. Pressed for more details, Meta sent a redacted copy of the administrative subpoena from DHS.