Even before immigration authorities began rounding up international students who had spoken out about Israel’s war on Gaza earlier this spring, there was a sense of fear among campus activists. Two graduate students at Cornell University — Momodou Taal and Amandla Thomas-Johnson — were so worried they would be targeted that they fled their dorms to lay low in a house outside Ithaca, New York.
As they feared, Homeland Security Investigations, the intelligence division of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, was intent to track them both down. As agents scrambled to find Taal and Thomas-Johnston, HSI sent subpoenas to Google and Meta for sensitive data information about their Gmail, Facebook, and Instagram accounts.
In Thomas-Johnston’s case, The Intercept found, Google handed over data to ICE before notifying him or giving him an opportunity to challenge the subpoena. By the time he found out about the data demand, Thomas-Johnston had already left the U.S.
During the first Trump administration, tech companies publicly fought federal subpoenas on behalf of their users who were targeted for protected speech — sometimes with great fanfare. With ICE ramping up its use of dragnet tools to meet its deportation quotas and smoke out noncitizens who protest Israel’s war on Gaza, Silicon Valley’s willingness to accommodate these kinds of subpoenas puts those who speak out at greater risk.
Lindsay Nash, a professor at Cardozo School of Law in New York who has studied ICE’s use of administrative subpoenas, said she was concerned but not surprised that Google complied with the subpoena about Thomas-Johnston’s account without notifying him.
