President Donald Trump's Department of Homeland Security is employing a "secretive legal weapon" to target and surveil Americans, according to a new report.
The Washington Post on Tuesday relaying the story of a retiree who found himself on the receiving end of it after speaking out against the deportation case against an Afghan asylum seeker.
"He had decided that the America he believed in would not make it if people like him didn’t speak up, so on a cool, rainy morning in the suburbs of Philadelphia, Jon, 67 and recently retired, marched up to his study and began to type," the Post's report detailed. "He had just read about the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s case against an Afghan it was trying to deport. The immigrant, identified in The Washington Post’s Oct. 30 investigation as H, had begged federal officials to reconsider, telling them the Taliban would kill him if he was returned to Afghanistan."
The retiree told the Post that he found the story "unconscionable," and after a quick Google search, he was able to find the email address of Joseph Dernbach, the lead prosecutor in H's case, named in the original story.
“Mr. Dernbach, don’t play Russian roulette with H’s life,” he wrote in an email. “Err on the side of caution. There’s a reason the US government along with many other governments don’t recognise the Taliban. Apply principles of common sense and decency.”
A little over five hours later, he received an email alert from Google notifying him that it had "received legal process from a Law Enforcement authority compelling the release of information related to your Google Account," listing the process as a subpoena and the authority as DHS. Not long after that alert, "men with badges" were at his door.
This was an example of an administrative subpoena – a tool that the federal government under Trump is increasingly leaning on — as they do not require authorizations from a judge or grand jury. "Tech experts and former agency staff" told the Post that thousands of these subpoenas are issued each year, potentially tens of thousands. They are "not subject to independent review, they can take just minutes to write up and, former staff say, officials throughout the agency, even in mid-level roles, have been given the authority to approve them."
"Though the U.S. government had been accused under previous administrations of overstepping laws and guidelines that restrict the subpoenas’ use, privacy and civil rights groups say that, under President Donald Trump, Homeland Security has weaponized the tool to strangle free speech," the report explained. "For many Americans, the anonymous ICE officer, masked and armed, represents Homeland Security’s most intimidating instrument, but the agency often targets people in a far more secretive way."
“There’s no oversight ahead of time, and there’s no ramifications for having abused it after the fact,” Jennifer Granick, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union, told the outlet. “As we are increasingly in a world where unmasking critics is important to the administration, this type of legal process is ripe for that kind of abuse.”
In a post to X, Drew Harwell, a technology reporter for the Post, decried these subpoenas as "a Kafkaesque form of domestic surveillance, intimidating Americans for lawful speech."