We’d like to give you some insight into how the Trump administration is targeting people for deportation and it’s really messed up. (Sorry for the length.)
The Trump administration has been using unverified, anonymous blacklists, specifically pro-Israel sites like Canary Mission and Betar, to identify and investigate international students and activists for possible deportation. These sites operate with zero transparency, yet they’ve been treated as credible sources by federal agencies.
In recent federal court testimony, Peter Hatch, a senior ICE official, admitted that his office created a “tiger team” to rapidly analyze thousands of names pulled directly from these websites. They didn’t know how people were selected or whether the claims were accurate. Yet ICE still used these profiles to submit official reports to the State Department, laying the groundwork for detentions and deportations.
What is Canary Mission?
– Anonymous & Unaccountable: No transparency about who runs it or how people are chosen.
– Doxxing Activists: Posts names, photos, social media, and affiliations of students and academics, often labeling them as antisemitic or linked to terrorism based on vague or out-of-context content.
– Career Sabotage: The site is built to show up in background checks, targeting people’s futures by flagging them for employers, schools, and even immigration officials.
What is Betar?
– Much less is known publicly, but it appears to work the same way, publishing anonymous lists of critics of Israeli policy, and branding them as extremists or security threats.
Why this matters?
This isn’t just shady. It’s a dangerous shift in how the U.S. government enforces immigration policy.
Instead of relying on verified intelligence or due process, it’s using ideologically driven websites, run by anonymous people, as a roadmap to silence dissent. That’s a direct attack on free speech.
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