The Feds Want to Unmask Instagram Accounts That Identified Immigration Agents
StopICE.net filed a motion to quash a subpoena about an Instagram video that identified a Border Patrol agent. The post The Feds Want to Unmask Instagram Accounts That Identified Immigration Agents appeared first on The Intercept.
On September 2, StopICE.net shared a video on its Instagram account naming and shaming a Border Patrol agent who had been spotted at recent immigration raids in greater Los Angeles.
To the soundtrack of Z-Ro’s “Crooked Officer,” the post includes a montage of photos of a uniformed Border Patrol agent, some with a gaiter over the bottom half of his face and others with his face uncovered. In one photo, a visible name badge reads “G. Simeon.”
“Let’s welcome Georgy Simeon to the wall of shame,” reads the caption posted by Long Beach Rapid Response, a community defense group and one of six Instagram accounts tagged as “collaborators” on the video, along with StopICE.net, which has nearly 500,000 subscribers signed up for its crowdsourced alerts about immigration raids around the country.
The day after the post about Simeon, the Department of Homeland Security sent an administrative subpoena to Meta, the parent company of Instagram, for information about StopICE.net’s account and others.
Despite clear protections under the First Amendment for photographing agents in public, the Trump administration has threatened to prosecute activists for “doxing” immigration officers. In May, ICE stormed a home in Irvine, California, in an effort to track down a man they accused of hanging posters with agents’ names and other information. Now DHS is trying to unmask accounts that dare to share the names of masked federal agents.
On Thursday, the developer behind StopICE.net, under the pseudonym “John Doe,” asked a court to block the subpoena, through a motion to quash filed in federal court in San Francisco by lawyers from Civil Liberties Defense Center.
The DHS subpoena was issued “without lawful authority,” the motion alleges, since it was based on a legal provision focused on immigration enforcement, rather than criminal matters.
“Providing the information requested by the government in its subpoena would compromise the exercise of Doe’s fundamental rights by chilling his ability to freely associate with others as well as to engage in political speech in a public forum,” the motion argues.
“This is a patent, open attempt to chill free speech critical of the government,” said Matthew Kellegrew, an attorney with the Civil Liberties Defense Center, which filed the motion.
U.S Customs and Border Protection did not immediately reply to a request for comment about the motion to block the subpoena. In response to a request for comment, Meta referred The Intercept to a webpage about the company’s compliance with data demands.
Sherman Austin, the developer behind StopICE.net, who is a U.S. citizen, doesn’t keep a particularly low profile. The Stop ICE Raids Alert Network website identifies Austin by name as the developer behind the project, and he’s given multiple interviews about his work. The group’s Instagram account also links to his personal handle.
But other accounts that collaborated on the video about Simeon, including Long Beach Rapid Response, are run anonymously.
Three days after the posting the video, Austin received an email from Meta’s Law Enforcement Response Team: “We have received legal process from law enforcement seeking information about your Instagram account.”
At first, Meta did not tell Austin which agency was demanding information about his account or what they were after. He pressed for more details, and Meta sent a redacted copy of an administrative subpoena from DHS.
The subpoena concerned “Officer Safety/Doxing: Simeon,” it reads, and DHS sent it “[p]ursuant to an official, criminal investigation regarding officer safety.” Meta also redacted the specific agency affiliation of the issuing officer, but it appears to have been sent by Border Patrol, based on the subpoena number and other details that were not redacted from the document. (An agency spokesperson said ICE did not issue the subpoena.)
“This was completely retaliatory, and a desperate attempt of intimidation because there’s obviously nothing illegal going on,” Austin told The Intercept. “They are trying to paint the false picture that reporting on ICE activity is somehow related to criminal activity, when it’s not. But that’s the precedent they are trying to set.”
“They are trying to paint the false picture that reporting on ICE activity is somehow related to criminal activity, when it’s not.”
The DHS subpoena asked Meta to provide the “subscriber names, e-mails and telephone numbers associated as of 08/01/2025 through 09/03/2025” for multiple Instagram accounts, but Meta redacted all of the other usernames aside from @stopicenet.
Siempre Unidos LA, a rapid response group whose account was also tagged as a collaborator on the Simeon video, told The Intercept that it has not received any subpoenas.
An attorney for Long Beach Rapid Response told The Intercept that the group also intends to file a motion to quash the DHS subpoena in the coming days. Although it never received any notice from Meta, potentially because of a technical glitch, Long Beach Rapid Response assumed its account was among those named in the DHS subpoena.
The three other accounts did not answer The Intercept’s questions.
DHS based its subpoena about the Simeon video on a broad legal provision that gives immigration officers authority to demand documents “relating to the privilege of any person to enter, reenter, reside in, or pass through the United States” or “concerning any matter which is material and relevant to the enforcement of” the U.S. immigration code.
Earlier this year, ICE agents invoked the same provision in administrative subpoenas sent to Meta and Google about campus Gaza activists.
In this case, however, ICE indicated the subpoena was issued as part of a “criminal investigation” about “officer safety,” rather than anything to do with immigration enforcement.
David Greene, an attorney and civil liberties director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said it was “a stretch, at best” for ICE to invoke this provision to get information about the Simeon video. “The focus of the statute is obtaining evidence about immigrants — these subpoenas are not an effort to do that,” Greene wrote in an email.
“The idea of immigration enforcement officers using the subpoena power under 8 U.S.C. 1225(d) to target the authors of social media posts that they dislike or want to dissuade seems both concerning and like it is pretty attenuated from the purpose of the statute,” said Lindsay Nash, a professor at Cardozo School of Law in New York who has studied ICE’s use of administrative subpoenas.
Tech companies are often much better positioned than users to challenge administrative subpoenas like these in court.
“ICE subpoenas are not self-executing,” Greene said, which means that “merely by receiving the letter, the platform is under no legal obligation to do anything. It remains the government’s duty to initiate a proceeding to enforce the subpoenas. So, we urge platforms to not voluntarily comply with these requests before any enforcement proceeding is initiated.”
But Meta told Austin he had 10 days to file a lawsuit before the company would hand his data over to ICE. The company later extended this deadline to September 19.
With this subpoena, the government “is attempting to improperly commandeer the traditional criminal investigatory powers reserved for other branches of federal government,” reads the motion to quash. “Simply put, there is no legitimate immigration enforcement purpose related to a criminal investigation of a U.S. citizen and their online speech in this instance.”
The post The Feds Want to Unmask Instagram Accounts That Identified Immigration Agents appeared first on The Intercept.
What's Your Reaction?
