The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has backed down from a fight to unmask the owners of Instagram and Facebook accounts monitoring Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) activity in Pennsylvania.
One of the anonymous account holders, John Doe, sued to block ICE from identifying him and other critics online through summonses to Meta that he claimed infringed on core First Amendment-protected activity.
DHS initially fought Doe’s motion to quash the summonses, arguing that the community watch groups endangered ICE agents by posting “pictures and videos of agents’ faces, license plates, and weapons, among other things.” This was akin to “threatening ICE agents to impede the performance of their duties,” DHS alleged. DHS’s arguments echoed DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, who has claimed that identifying ICE agents is a crime, even though Wired noted that ICE employees often post easily discoverable LinkedIn profiles.
To Doe, the agency seemed intent on testing the waters to see if it could seize authority to unmask all critics online by invoking a customs statute that allows agents to subpoena information on goods entering or leaving the US.
But then, on January 16, DHS abruptly reversed course, withdrawing its summonses from Meta.
A court filing confirmed that DHS dropped its requests for subscriber information last week, after initially demanding Doe’s “postal code, country, all email address(es) on file, date of account creation, registered telephone numbers, IP address at account signup, and logs showing IP address and date stamps for account accesses.”
The filing does not explain why DHS decided to withdraw its requests.
However, previously, DHS requested similar information from Meta about six Instagram community watch groups that shared information about ICE activity in Los Angeles and other locations. DHS withdrew those requests, too, after account holders defended their First Amendment rights and filed motions to quash their summonses, Doe’s court filing said.
