JokersUpdates.com: Current Affairs - and this: The Frightening, Very Real Tool ICE Agents Have to Add You to a “Nice Little Database” if You Attend a Protest

Imagine you attend a protest, like hundreds of thousands of Americans have since President Donald Trump began his second term. Perhaps it is a No Kings event, or a local ICE demonstration to protest Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s crackdown on immigrants in your community. During the protest, you take a video of yourself and your fellow protesters, caption it “Abolish ICE,” and upload it to Instagram. A few weeks later, there’s a knock on your door. Federal agents stand before you, demanding to question you.

You’re wondering to yourself: Do they know about the protest I attended? Are they legally allowed to track me? Do I have to comply?

The answer to these first two questions is, shockingly, yes, and it’s made possible in part by a little-known power that the Trump administration has supercharged in recent months. The answer to the last question is much more complicated. The Department of Homeland Security is one of a number of federal agencies with something called administrative subpoena power, and it has been leveraging that tool in unprecedented ways under Trump 2.0. The Washington Post detailed these abuses this week, focusing on the story of a U.S. citizen targeted by DHS for simply emailing a federal prosecutor his opinion about the federal government’s case against an Afghan national facing deportation.

How can something like this happen? Congress has granted administrative subpoena power to federal agencies, like the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Federal Communications Commission, to allow them to access information quickly to make decisions about issues under their purview. A key distinction between administrative subpoenas and civil or criminal ones is that federal agencies do not need a judge’s sign-off. These agencies retain the power to approve administrative subpoenas themselves. This also means that agencies can demand documents without needing to prove that there is an ongoing investigation into or probable cause against a person when issuing administrative subpoenas.

Federal agencies are not legally required to disclose how many administrative subpoenas they issue, but under the Trump administration, unnamed sources told the Post, the volume of administrative subpoenas is “well into the thousands, if not tens of thousands.” Lindsay Nash, a professor at Cardozo School of Law, authored a study on the immigration subpoena power and found, through publicly available regulations and internal records, that ICE has empowered its employees—even those focused on civil immigration enforcement—“to demand records and testimony from any person or entity in order to obtain information for any civil or criminal investigation within the agency’s broad domain.”

“At present, there is generally no requirement that officers have probable cause, identify the suspected violation, or exercise restraint,” Nash wrote. This is being exemplified with abuses like the one documented in the Post story, plus footage of federal agents taking pictures of protesters and threatening to add them to “a nice little database,” which some anonymous national security officials claim does in fact exist as a way for DHS and the FBI to track people labeled as “domestic terrorists.” (DHS publicly denies that there is such a database.)

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2026/02/ice-agents-nice-little-database-google-meta-surveillance.html