Over the past year, ICE agents have scanned the faces of protesters, photographed their license plates, and collected samples of their DNA.

But the agency hasn’t said how or where it’s storing that information.

As President Donald Trump’s administration boosts its arsenal of surveillance technologies—and a growing number of Trump’s critics report unsettling experiences after encounters with ICE—many Americans fear they’re being tracked for exercising their First Amendment rights. In February, one ICE agent told a Maine legal observer that he’d added her information to “a nice little database,” since she was now “considered a domestic terrorist.”

The Department of Homeland Security disavowed that agent’s statements and has vehemently denied maintaining a “domestic terrorist” database of US citizens who protest ICE. But the agency has also included vague carve-outs for law enforcement investigations, telling Congress in an April letter that when “individuals decide to go beyond protected speech and commit crimes against federal personnel and property … ICE remains steadfast in exercising its authority to investigate and prosecute violators.”

And the administration’s definition of such crimes has grown extraordinarily expansive, with the Justice Department aggressively pursuing federal charges against anti-ICE activists in a string of cases that attempt to reframe protest activity as criminal conspiracy.

Public records shared with Mother Jones appear to contradict DHS’ statements about protester surveillance. A July 2025 report reveals that at least two officers affiliated with Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) systematically collected vehicle, license plate, and social media information from everyday people last summer, and at times entered that data into a digital evidence management platform. Some of the surveilled individuals attended an anti-ICE protest. Another simply drove his Jeep around a public parking lot. Yet another took photographs of a musician’s tour bus, mistakenly believing it to be an ICE transport vehicle. The report does not state that any of these people were under investigation for any wrongdoing.

The July 2025 report was filed by Stacey Carr, a member of the Spokane Police Department’s special victims unit, who also serves as an HSI task force officer investigating internet crimes against children (ICAC) in Washington state. As a task force officer, Carr is deputized to carry out ICAC investigations on behalf........

© Mother Jones