DHS Wants Your Email, Phone, and Social Handles as Reddit, Discord, Meta Ordered to Give Names of ICE Critics
Here is something worth knowing: an administrative subpoena does not require a judge. No court reviews the request before it lands on a tech company's desk. The Department of Homeland Security writes one up, signs it, and sends it off. If the company refuses, DHS can either drop it or go to court to try to enforce it. That is the only check on the system.Until recently, these subpoenas were used sparingly — child abductions, customs fraud, the kind of cases where speed mattered and the target was specific. Over the past year, DHS has fired off hundreds of them to four of the largest technology companies in the world, the New York Times reported on 14 February, citing four government officials and tech employees with knowledge of the requests.The targets were anonymous social media accounts. Some had criticised ICE. Others tracked the locations of immigration agents in their communities, posting in English and Spanish. DHS wanted names, email addresses, phone numbers and whatever other identifying details the platforms held.Google, Meta, Reddit complied with some of the requests. Discord has not publicly confirmed whether it did.
What a Judge-Free Subpoena Actually MeansStrip away the legalese and the picture is rather blunt. DHS does not need to show probable cause. It does not need to name a specific crime. In one case reported by WinBuzzer, Google received an ICE subpoena that left the section describing the suspected violation entirely blank. Google fulfilled it the same day it notified the user — leaving, in practical terms, zero opportunity to challenge the demand in court.The Electronic Frontier Foundation, in an open letter sent to ten major platforms on 10 February, put it plainly: companies should require a court order before handing anything over, because DHS has already proved its own subpoenas cannot survive legal scrutiny. Every time someone has challenged one in court, the agency has withdrawn it rather than let a judge rule.That pattern is worth sitting with for a moment. The government issues a demand. If nobody fights it, the demand is met. If somebody does fight it, the government quietly pulls the demand before a court can say whether it was lawful. Then it issues another one to someone else.The Montgomery County CaseMontco Community Watch runs a pair of Facebook and Instagram accounts in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania. They post bilingual alerts — English and Spanish — about sightings of ICE agents, and solicit tips from roughly 10,000 followers. The accounts do not use real names.On 11 September 2025, DHS sent two administrative subpoenas to Meta demanding the identities behind those accounts. The legal citation was 19 U.S.C. § 1509: a federal statute designed for customs investigations relating to merchandise. Not immigration. Not law enforcement threats. Merchandise.Meta notified the account holders on 3 October — 22 days later. The company told them that if it did not receive documentation within ten days proving they were fighting the subpoena in court, it would hand their details to DHS.Ten days. To find a lawyer, prepare a motion, and file it in federal court.The ACLU of Pennsylvania managed it. Steve Loney, a senior supervising attorney with the organisation, filed an urgent motion to quash. 'The government is taking more liberties than they used to,' Loney told the New York Times. 'It's a whole other level of frequency and lack of accountability.'DHS withdrew the subpoena on 16 January 2026 — before a judge could rule on whether it was lawful. The ACLU has since filed a motion demanding the government cover legal fees for what it called a baseless attempt to access its clients' data.Whether DHS expected the ACLU to get involved that quickly, or whether it assumed a community-run bilingual Instagram page in suburban Pennsylvania wouldn't have the resources to fight back, is a question nobody at the agency has answered.
One Email, Five HoursThe Montgomery County case at least involved an account with thousands of followers posting about ICE movements. The Google retiree case did not.In October 2025, a retired American read a Washington Post article about DHS lawyers trying to deport an Afghan asylum seeker. He found the lead attorney's government email address — Joseph Dernbach, listed on the Florida Bar's website — and sent a short message urging him to apply 'principles of common sense and decency' to the case.Within five hours, DHS issued an immigration enforcement subpoena to Google. It demanded the retiree's session logs, IP address, physical address, every Google service he used, and identifying information including his credit card number, driving licence and Social Security number. Google notified him. Several weeks later, two DHS agents and a local police officer appeared at his home to question him about the email.The agents conceded that the email broke no laws. The ACLU is challenging the subpoena.A retired man sent a polite email to a government lawyer whose address was publicly listed. Five hours later, the federal government subpoenaed his entire digital footprint. Weeks after that, agents were on his doorstep. That is the system working as intended, if you take DHS at its word that it has 'broad administrative subpoena authority'. Whether it is the system working as the Constitution intended is a different matter entirely.Beyond Subpoenas: The Broader CampaignThe subpoenas are not happening in isolation; they're one arm of something wider. Attorney General Pam Bondi and DHS Secretary Kristi Noem have spent months pressuring tech companies to suppress ICE-related content, and — this is the part that makes the legal strategy so unusual — they have been quite open about it.In early October 2025, Bondi told Fox News she had reached out to Apple 'demanding' it remove an ICE-tracking app called ICEBlock from the App Store. Apple complied. It also removed a separate app called Eyes Up, built by an Indiana man named Mark Hodges to archive user-submitted footage of immigration enforcement. Apple cited 'information from law enforcement about safety risks'. Weeks later, Facebook disabled a group called ICE Sightings – Chicagoland, which had nearly 100,000 members. Bondi took credit on X, writing that 'outreach' from the Department of Justice led to the removal.On 11 February, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression filed a federal lawsuit — Rosado v. Bondi — in the Northern District of Illinois, alleging that Bondi and Noem violated the First Amendment by coercing Apple and Facebook into censoring protected speech. Kae Rosado, the Chicago small business owner who started the Facebook group, told FIRE: 'They silenced not only my voice, but the voices of nearly 100,000 other community members.'Mind you, this is not a case where the government is denying what it did. Bondi boasted about the app removals. Noem said ICEBlock 'sure looks like' obstruction of justice and discussed prosecuting CNN for running a segment about it. White House border czar Tom Homan has talked publicly about building a database of people arrested for interfering with immigration enforcement. 'We're going to make sure everyone knows who they are,' he told Laura Ingraham.The EFF's open letter, the FIRE lawsuit, the ACLU's court filings, Representative Jamie Raskin's announced investigation into DOJ pressure on app stores — these are all live. So is the Resist and Unsubscribe boycott, a month-long consumer campaign launched on 30 January by NYU marketing professor Scott Galloway targeting ten tech companies for their cooperation with the administration. It is not clear yet whether any of it will change the trajectory.In 2017, Twitter sued the federal government to block an administrative subpoena seeking to unmask an account critical of the first Trump administration. The subpoena was withdrawn. Eight years on, the same tool is being used — or rather, the same tool is being deployed at a scale that makes 2017 look like a rehearsal, which is the kind of escalation that tends to produce a court ruling eventually, assuming DHS stops pulling its subpoenas before a judge can weigh in.So far it hasn't. The ACLU wins by filing. DHS wins by withdrawing. And the next subpoena arrives at someone else's inbox the following week.
