As social media monitoring expands, advocates warn of a chilling effect on speech, organizing, and digital safety.
As immigration enforcement intensifies across the United States, Hootsuite’s renewed work with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is drawing renewed concern from Latino communities already living under heightened scrutiny. For many families, ICE is not an abstract federal agency but a daily presence tied to raids, deportations, and separation. That context is why the Vancouver-based social media company’s decision to provide monitoring tools to ICE through the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is resonating far beyond the tech industry.
A Deal Revisited, a Different Moment
Hootsuite is providing “social listening” services that allow ICE to analyze public conversations and sentiment on platforms such as Facebook and X, according to reporting by The Globe and Mail. The contract began as a $95,000 pilot project and falls under a broader DHS framework that includes Customs and Border Protection (CBP), as reported by CityNews Vancouver.
The agreement echoes a 2020 controversy, when Hootsuite canceled a similar deal after employees protested ICE’s role in family separations. Today, the political landscape has shifted, but enforcement remains deeply felt in Latino neighborhoods, where workplace raids, expanded detention, and accelerated removals have again become a source of fear.
Why Social Monitoring Hits Latino Communities Hard
Latinos are among the most active social media users in the country, using platforms to share legal resources, warn neighbors about enforcement activity, organize rapid-response networks, and document encounters with authorities. Advocates warn that even high-level monitoring can suppress participation.
Digital rights researchers, including those cited by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, have long warned that aggregated public data can still reveal patterns about communities and locations — information that becomes especially sensitive when analyzed by immigration enforcement agencies.
Hootsuite CEO Irina Novoselsky has said the company’s terms of service prohibit surveillance, individual tracking, or identifying undocumented people, framing the tools as limited to sentiment analysis. Civil liberties groups counter that enforcement agencies often combine data sources, making boundaries difficult to verify externally.
Hootsuite serves over 18 million users and more than 800 Fortune 1000 companies, including media outlets, healthcare systems, and community organizations. That reach means the same infrastructure used to build audiences and businesses is also being used to assess public reaction to immigration enforcement.
For Latino communities navigating renewed enforcement pressure, the concern is not only about one contract, but about how visibility, speech, and safety are being reshaped in a digital system where private tech firms quietly influence public power.
