PORTLAND, Maine — Protesters and legal observers who have confronted and clashed with federal immigration agents say they have been threatened with retaliation and suspect the government is keeping tabs on them as a kind of official blacklisting campaign.
In one video widely circulated on social media, a Maine woman who was filming Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers in Portland last week noticed one agent had taken a picture of the license plate on her car.
“Why are you taking my information down?” she asked.
“Because we have a nice little database, and now you’re considered a domestic terrorist,” the agent responded.
In other instances, people across Maine have reported observing an ICE arrest and then receiving a phone call or a knock on the door from someone purporting to be an agent, telling them they could end up on a domestic terrorist list, according to Zach Heiden, chief counsel of the ACLU of Maine.
“People are being told that their names are going on a list, that their personal information is going into a domestic terrorism database, or they’re creating a file on them, all sorts of things that smack of authoritarian regimes that we don’t typically try to emulate,” Heiden said.
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A South Portland woman said she received one such call last week, just a few hours after her spouse had stopped to take photos of an ICE arrest while driving her car. “He said, ‘This is the Department of Homeland Security,’” said Lynn, who asked to be identified only by her middle name because she fears being targeted. She said the person on the phone asked whether she had been at an ICE arrest earlier in the day, and warned her she could be placed on a domestic terror watch list.
The call lasted one minute, but the fear it caused has stuck around. “It just feels very real, these tactics they’re using to intimidate and feel scary,” the woman said. As a queer woman and a foster parent, especially, she worries.
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A spokesperson for Homeland Security on Sunday denied the agency was compiling such a database, according to CNN. “There is no database of ‘domestic terrorists’ run by DHS,” Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin told CNN. “We do of course monitor and investigate and refer all threats, assaults, and obstruction of our officers to the appropriate law enforcement. Obstructing and assaulting law enforcement is a felony and a federal crime.”
But earlier statements from other Trump administration officials, as well as reports of incidents in Minneapolis, where two protesters were killed by immigration agents in recent weeks, suggest the government is indeed taking names.
A Minnesota woman who was following ICE agents to observe their actions sued Homeland Security alleging the government revoked her Global Entry status at US Customs and Border Protection several days later. She said in her suit that an agent had confronted her by name, saying they were using facial recognition technology and recording the encounter with a body camera.
“I am not particularly concerned with the revocation of my privileges in isolation,” Nicole Cleland, who is an executive at retail giant Target, wrote in a declaration for the lawsuit. “However, given that only three days had passed from the time that I was stopped, I am concerned that the revocation was the result of me following and observing the agents. This is intimidation and retaliation.””
Meanwhile, onJan. 15, Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, told Fox News that “we’re going to create a database where those people that are arrested for interference, impeding, and assault, we’re going to make them famous.”
He’s just one of the administration’s high-ranking officials who has used highly charged and accusatory language to describe protesters. Others, such as DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, have come under fire for describing Alex Pretti, the Minneapolis man who was killed by immigration authorities last week, as a “domestic terrorist” who was planning to “massacre” agents.
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And a memo sent by a Homeland Security official in Minneapolis earlier this month to a group of agents deployed to the state outlined a form they should use to record personal information about protesters, according to CNN.
The form is labeled “intel collection non-arrests,” and agents were instructed to “capture all images, license plates, identifications, and general information on hotels, agitators, protestors, etc., so we can capture it all in one consolidated form,” according to the communications obtained by CNN.
FBI Director Kash Patel, meanwhile, told conservative podcaster Benny Johnson that the agency was investigating group texts on Signal, the online hub for encrypted conversation used by organizers for protests, ICE watches, and other assistance in Maine and other states with ICE presence.
In the podcast, Patel said he wanted to learn whether protesters’ sharing of license plate numbers and locations of immigration agents might be putting them at risk.
“You cannot create a scenario that illegally entraps and puts law enforcement in harm’s way,” Patel said.
Whether there is a database, Heiden of the ACLU said, the stories he’s heard from people in Maine raise troubling issues.
If there is such a database, he said, “the government has no business creating databases or files of people engaging in lawful, peaceful, constitutionally protected activity.” Appeals courts have ruled that the First Amendment protects a person’s right to record law enforcement activities in public.
And if the government isn’t collecting such information, but rather just threatening people, that’s a problem too, Heiden said.
“It’s still making people afraid and it’s making them reluctant to do things that the Constitution protects them when they’re doing,” he said.
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Sabrina Shankman can be reached at [email protected].