Bulwark writer Catherine Rampell reports the administration of president Donald Trump is quietly building the kinds of watchlists that should make historians nervous.
“There are lists of immigrants, lists of people with developmental disabilities, lists of dissidents — and lately, even lists of Jews,” said Rampell. “All ostensibly in the name of public safety.”
The administration recently sued the University of Pennsylvania to surrender a list of Jewish faculty, staff, and students, all without obtaining consent from Jewish community members themselves. The administration claims they require the Jewish registry to “combat antisemitism” on college campuses. But critics argue there’s no guarantee such a list wouldn’t fall into the wrong hands, particularly in this administration’s coalition with so many “Jew haters and Holocaust deniers,” Rampell claims. It’s certainly a bad idea in this political environment, where young white men are getting busted for trying to burn Jewish churches in Jackson, Mississippi.
“Against a backdrop of rising antisemitism, white supremacy, and other forms of hate, the danger that lists of Jews or other groups could fall into the wrong hands looms especially large,” according to a filing this week from groups affiliated with UPenn.
“The possibility that these data could be misused is not just a baseless, hypothetical concern: Again and again the Trump administration has been caught sharing data and breaching confidential records for purposes other than the stated reason for why those confidential records were collected in the first place,” said Rampell.
Just last year a whistleblower alleged that DOGE had unlawfully accessed private Social Security data and copied it into an unsecure cloud environment susceptible to manipulation and exposure.
“They’ve been sucking up data from all across government for immigration enforcement purposes, like basically anything that might have names, familial relationship, address, any geographic information,” said Bethanne Barnes, the former chief data officer for the Administration for Children and Families at Health and Human Services. “Just assume it’s all getting sucked in.”
“Barnes quit, she told me last week, in part due to some ‘funny business’ related to the government’s matching up of information on immigrant children with a national database of employment records,” Rampell said.
Meanwhile, Rampell reports the National Institutes of Health director echoed a certain unsettling historical figure when he announced that his agency will be creating a “disease registry” of people with autism — compiled without consent and against the wishes of members of the autism community.
Trump’s border czar Tom Homan, similarly, is threatening to create his own “database” of ICE protestors, which Rampell said sounds “an awful lot like twentieth-century government databases of Commies, wrongthinkers, and other political enemies. Or perhaps worse historical analogues, from Europe, also implemented in the name of keeping the public safe from the enemies within.”
“So I ask you, my fellow Americans,” concluded Rampell. “Do you feel safer yet?”
Read the Bulwark report at this link.