This May, the Georgetown Law Center on Privacy and Technology released an updated version of an already alarming evaluation of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)’s handling of data. The introduction to the new version comments on their prescience:

“When we published American Dragnet: Data-Driven Deportation in the 21st Century in 2022, we understood that the surveillance infrastructure our report describes could one day be deployed by an authoritarian executive to coerce and control the U.S. population at scale. We did not anticipate that this day would come within three years. Our hope was that the findings of our research would be useful for the communities organizing against immigration policing and digital surveillance, and would help to provoke policy change. Today, as masked federal agents abduct students off the street in broad daylight, and the President scoffs at an order from the Supreme Court to facilitate the return of a man illegally deported to El Salvador, and his administration threatens to suspend habeas corpus, to hope to be saved by ‘policy change’ would be to indulge in soothing nonsense.”

Now, in June, we’re continuing to watch this happen, with occasional challenges. For instance, the ongoing a bench trial challenging the Trump administration’s attempts to deport international students for expressing pro-Palestinian sentiments.

A large workload

The lawsuit was filed by the Knight Institute against the administration on behalf the American Association of University Professors and the Middle East Studies Association. American Association of University Professors v. Rubio alleges that “the administration’s policy of ideological deportation violates the First Amendment right of the plaintiffs to hear from and associate with noncitizen students and faculty, that it is unconstitutionally vague, and that it violates the Administrative Procedure Act.”

The testimony given in this trial more than confirmed the Georgetown Center’s concerns when Peter Hatch, assistant director for the Office of Investigations at DHS, testified that “he moved analysts from the counterintelligence counterterrorism unit, cyber intelligence unit, global trade intelligence unit and others to work on the Tiger Team because of the large workload.”

The Tiger Team’s tails tales

What’s the Tiger Team? A team organized by the DHS within ICE for the purpose of gathering data on university student and faculty activists protesting in defense of Palestinians, so that this information could be passed along to the State Department, which would then become a justification for arresting and deporting those students and faculty.

Hatch described their primary source of this data, a website called Canary Mission which “documents people and groups that promote hatred of the USA, Israel, and Jews on North American college campuses” according to their self-description in the site’s metadata.

The site includes over 5,000 names, research on which created the “large workload” that Hatch described: “I was not given a deadline but I knew … that we need to work through this expeditiously.” Hence the launch of the Tiger Team, which investigated any individual whose name was passed along by leadership within HSI: Homeland Security Intelligence: “We can be asked to look into any individual.”

Senator Joseph McCarthy would’ve been a huge fan– all someone has to do is appear on a website cataloging people who “promote hatred of the USA,” the very sort that McCarthy targeted himself, except that McCarthy generally pursued these accused Communists who had obtained some level of power within either the government or in industry, as well as– wait for it– academic faculty.

Recall that Secretary of State Marco Rubio approved the arrest of Columbia grad student Mahmoud Khalil by portraying him as nothing less than a national security threat to the U.S. “The foreign policy of the United States champions core American interests and American citizens and condoning anti-Semitic conduct and disruptive protests in the United States would severely undermine that significant foreign policy objective,” Rubio wrote in a memo, apparently unaware that his own State Department website excludes from its definition of antisemitism “criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country.”

Protesters who criticize Israel for its crimes against Palestinians are doing the same as those who criticize any country for its crimes against minority populations, a manner of expression explicitly protected by the First Amendment: “the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

Thus the only form of justification used for arresting and deporting these students stems from “reports” about their allegedly anti-American activity that have been gathered and analyzed so they can be used as evidence against those students.

And so we have a “Tiger Team” combing sites that claim to have cultivated a blacklist of allegedly highly influential activists described as hating America, who may as a result suffer not just loss of reputation and livelihood, or even a prison term, but expulsion from the country. Potentially to a torture prison in El Salvador.

“Data” is a term colloquially used to reference a collection of facts. Analyzing data means validating it and examining it to derive actionable insights. If you’re not starting with actual data, “analysis” amounts to repetition of a pernicious rumor to which your work lends credibility, causing it to be accepted by your audience and amplified to the level of a narrative. Potentially a dangerous narrative.

It feels bizarrely unnecessary to point out that the Tiger Team’s mission was therefore doomed by bad faith from the start, and yet they did do the equivalent of asking the KKK for data about advocates for black equality, so they could analyze it and determine where to find trees that properly support nooses.

The path to legitimacy is as follows:

First, identify a party to demonize. Ideally a group, because they can be assumed to have nefarious or loathsome properties in common (that is, after all, how bigotry works). Next, you have two options:

Option A: If they’re comparatively powerless, deny their agency and dehumanize them, portraying them as vermin. Use all available data to support allegations that they are a pernicious mass whose very presence in the country tarnishes it, which leaves open the possibility of outliers who are actually decent. And yet the country they come from is “not sending their best,” and essentialism says that circumstances of birth (such as location) can be inherently damning. Even people trying to escape a fascist regime in another country can thus be portrayed as somehow carrying fascism with them to ours, which I suppose makes sense if you’re claiming that they’re diseased.

Option B: If your enemy is somewhat powerful and influential, over-assert their agency. Make them criminal masterminds, with the desire to control the unassuming, manipulate their minds, and thereby subvert the very fabric of America. Label them something like “national security threat.” Use all available data to assign them a criminal background that would make of Genghis Khan a dedicated fanboy. Represent them as so powerful that America can’t take the risk of allowing such people anywhere out of prison, or even remain in the country.

They say that the plural of anecdote is not data– and yet pluralizing a claim that is not founded in data as if it is, pretending to examine its veracity and coming out of it with a hearty thumbs-up, lends a level of authority that wouldn’t exist for a story about some single or collection of individuals’ unsavory behavior.

Tiny truths v. massive mendacities

“We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country,” said Donald Trump two years ago.  Then he was re-elected, to resume shouting such eloquent ideology through the loudest megaphone in the world.

It’s tempting to say that he can do this because groups like the Tiger Team lend him their claws– except he’s the one who gave them those claws to begin with, for this very reason.

All because some college kids saw something that, to them, resembles genocide.

So they spoke up about it, and face the full onslaught of the federal government as a consequence.

Let’s take a lesson from the previous “banal” accumulations of information/facts/data throughout history that have resulted in events very much like this one, and recognized those malignant pebbles for what they are– the cumulative foundations of a terrible edifice. One that can be disassembled piece by piece, in the same way it was constructed.

Anyone can do it. Everyone must do it.