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A coalition of privacy and civil liberties advocates filed a federal lawsuit Friday accusing the Trump administration of secretly collecting and keeping personal information about people who monitor U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations, arguing that the practice violates federal privacy law and threatens constitutionally protected speech and association.

The lawsuit — filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia — was brought by individuals and advocacy groups represented by Democracy Forward.

The plaintiffs — the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) and legal observers Nicole Cleland, Jacquelyn Ivey, and Anna Walker — argued that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and other federal agencies created and maintained databases of people who observed, documented, or protested immigration enforcement activities without providing notification or safeguards, as required under the Privacy Act of 1974.

That law was passed after the exposure of illegal government surveillance, including longtime former Federal Bureau of Investigation Director J. Edgar Hoover’s infamous COINTELPRO program, under which the FBI, in addition to conducting unlawful spying, funded and armed murderous far-right militants to terrorize anti-Vietnam War protesters, anti-nuclear weapons activists, civil rights leaders including Martin Luther King, Jr., and other leftists.

“The federal government cannot build secret dossiers on people because they exercise their First Amendment right to peacefully observe, document, or criticize its actions,” Democracy Forward president and CEO Skye Perryman said in a statement announcing the lawsuit. “That is exactly the kind of government surveillance Congress sought to prevent when it enacted the Privacy Act after some of the darkest chapters in our nation’s history.”

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