The Government Unconstitutionally Labels ICE Observers as Domestic Terrorists
On December 4, the Department of Justice (DOJ)
disseminated a memorandum to all federal prosecutors creating a strategy for arresting and charging individuals supposedly aligned with “Antifa.” The memo requires DOJ to investigate and identify the “most serious, most readily provable” crimes committed by potential targets, including those with “extreme views in favor of mass migration and open borders.”
Specifically, the document defines domestic terrorism broadly to include “doxing” and “impeding” immigration and other law enforcement. Doxing is not specifically defined, but the memo references calls to require Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to give their names and operate unmasked. Individuals who donate to organizations that “impede” or “dox” will be investigated and deemed to have supported “domestic terrorism.”
Therefore, it is crucial to understand that ICE and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) consider people who follow DHS and ICE agents to observe, record, or protest their operations as engaging in “impeding.” DHS has a systematic policy of threatening people who follow ICE or DHS agents to record their activities with detentions, arrests, and violence, and agents have already chased, detained, arrested, charged, struck, and shot at people who follow them.
The purpose of this post is to establish that these incidents are not isolated overreach by individual agents, but rather, an official, nationwide policy of intimidating and threatening people who attempt to observe and record DHS operations. This matters legally because courts are more likely to enjoin an official policy rather than impose some new requirements to stop sporadic, uncoordinated actions by individual agents.