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After setting up robust rapid-response groups to resist Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) abductions and stopping the buying up of warehouses to detain thousands of immigrants, activists are now focusing on other ways they can disrupt the Trump administration’s plans for mass deportations. On the East Coast, some are targeting the parking spots that ICE uses for staging arrests. In Buffalo, New York, people are fighting to evict ICE from an office building where they coordinate operations and detain people. In Vermont, activists are planning a week of action to shut down a major ICE surveillance center hidden away in an office park.

Vermont has a reputation as a progressive state that is home to the democratic socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders and the birthplace of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, whose founders are known for their political activism. The second-least populous state in the country, the federal government is also taking advantage of Vermont’s remoteness to conduct surveillance on immigrants.

The National Criminal Analysis and Targeting Center is housed at the White Cap Business Park in Williston, a rural town in Vermont with a population of about 10,000. Activists say it is one of two such centers, with the other one located in Laguna Niguel, California, based in conservative Orange County.

The Law Enforcement Support Center is also located nearby, on Williston’s Harvest Lane, where ICE operates a hotline for anyone across the country who wants to call in to report “suspicious activity.” The hotline center boasts that it is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week to process 55,000 hotline tips annually.

The capability to process mass amounts of data is dizzying. Both facilities are part of a “Targeting Operations Division” that processes 1.55 million biometric and biographic queries annually. ICE claims to have access to 340,000 records. The agency communicates with more than 13,000 law enforcement agencies throughout the country, many of them through an expanding network of 287(g) agreements that incentivize collaboration between ICE and local police. In 2021, the division analyzed records of some 7.7 million people for the “identification and removal of criminal noncitizens in the United States.”

More Details Emerge of Trump’s Secret Use of ICE to Spy on Critics

Since 9/11, there has been a proliferation of these kinds of fusion centers and real-time crime centers, which amass large amounts of information for police surveillance systems. Automated license plate readers, like those sold to police by Flock Safety, have received the greatest amount of public scrutiny, but there are other tools like facial recognition technology, drones, ShotSpotter, and social media monitoring software.

Activists in Vermont are putting a spotlight on the ICE office to expose what they call a major “spy center” carrying out an unprecedented level of state violence.

Midway Blitz Surveillance

The full scope of the government’s growing surveillance operations is not yet known, but details about last summer’s escalation of ICE violence are emerging.

During so-called “Operation Midway Blitz” in Chicago, Marimar Martinez, a 30-year-old citizen and school teacher, was shot five times by Border Patrol agent Charles Exum. She later testified before members of Congress about the horrifying........

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