Mother Jones illustration; Ryan Murphy/AFP/Getty
Over the past year, ICE agents have scanned the faces of protesters, photographed their license plates, and collected samples of their DNA.
But the agency hasn’t said how or where it’s storing that information.
As President Donald Trump’s administration boosts its arsenal of surveillance technologies—and a growing number of Trump’s critics report unsettling experiences after encounters with ICE—many Americans fear they’re being tracked for exercising their First Amendment rights. In February, one ICE agent told a Maine legal observer that he’d added her information to “a nice little database,” since she was now “considered a domestic terrorist.”
The Department of Homeland Security disavowed that agent’s statements and has vehemently denied maintaining a “domestic terrorist” database of US citizens who protest ICE. But the agency has also included vague carve-outs for law enforcement investigations, telling Congress in an April letter that when “individuals decide to go beyond protected speech and commit crimes against federal personnel and property … ICE remains steadfast in exercising its authority to investigate and prosecute violators.”
And the administration’s definition of such crimes has grown extraordinarily expansive, with the Justice Department aggressively pursuing federal charges against anti-ICE activists in a string of cases that attempt to reframe protest activity as criminal conspiracy.
Public records shared with Mother Jones appear to contradict DHS’ statements about protester surveillance. A July 2025 report reveals that at least two officers affiliated with Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) systematically collected vehicle, license plate, and social media information from everyday people last summer, and at times entered that data into a digital evidence management platform. Some of the surveilled individuals attended an anti-ICE protest. Another simply drove his Jeep around a public parking lot. Yet another took photographs of a musician’s tour bus, mistakenly believing it to be an ICE transport vehicle. The report does not state that any of these people were under investigation for any wrongdoing.
The July 2025 report was filed by Stacey Carr, a member of the Spokane Police Department’s special victims unit, who also serves as an HSI task force officer investigating internet crimes against children (ICAC) in Washington state. As a task force officer, Carr is deputized to carry out ICAC investigations on behalf of HSI and works directly out of ICE’s Spokane field office, a building that became a flashpoint for mass protests against ICE in June of that year.
HSI is normally tasked with investigating serious crimes, like human trafficking, narcotics smuggling, war crimes, and child exploitation. But in September 2025, then-acting ICE Director Todd Lyons told right-wing podcast host Glenn Beck that the agency would use HSI agents to investigate anti-ICE protesters, claiming that protesters in Chicago were “paid professional agitators” engaging in “domestic terrorism.”
Carr’s July 2025 report offers an unprecedented look into the thought process and surveillance activities of an HSI task force officer.
The report begins with an incident on May 22, 2025, weeks before Spokane erupted with anti-ICE protests. That day, Carr’s SVU unit was at the Spokane ICE field office assisting state troopers with an arrest unrelated to immigration enforcement. An outdoor music amphitheater lies across the street, and later that day, Willie Nelson, Bob Dylan, and other artists were set to play at the 10th anniversary tour of the Outlaw Music Festival.
“A large white bus, which I assumed with [sic] a bus with the Willie Nelson band was parked in front of the building,” Carr wrote. “To an unknowing person this could have been mistaken for an immigration transport vehicle.” Carr watched as “an older white man” began photographing the bus and the Washington State Patrol vehicle. When he saw Carr watching him, he began filming her. Carr then “turned [her] back to him and watched him through the reflection in [her] window,” noting that she “work[s] undercover regularly and did not want [her] picture made public if possible.”
“I regularly work undercover and drive an undercover vehicle. I am not easily recognizable as a police officer and blend well with crowds.”
Carr did, however, attempt to make the older man’s information known within law enforcement circles, combing through social media pages in an attempt to identify who’d been filming her. She found some names but, unable to verify them, seemingly did not save that information.
A Spokane Police Department spokesperson said Carr is the only SPD detective assigned to HSI’s ICAC division, but she “cannot and will not engage in immigration enforcement per [the 2019 Keep Washington Working Act],” which limits state and local police from assisting ICE with civil immigration enforcement. The spokesperson added that, while HSI runs ICAC, the office “is located on a different floor and section than ICE.”
Over the following weeks, more people visited ICE’s Spokane field office to observe operations. By the week of June 8, they were “standing around the building with protest signs,” Carr’s report notes, “but they remained peaceful.”
On the morning of June 10, Carr was in her vehicle in the ICE office parking lot, getting ready to go in to work. “While speaking on the phone, I saw a silver Jeep Gladiator slowly pull into the public parking lot with the windows rolled down,” Carr wrote. She watched as the Jeep “backed into a spot across from [her].” She noted that “the driver did not get out or take any action,” but she still looked up the plate. The driver briefly drove away, then returned to the lot, at which point Carr approached the driver of the vehicle and asked if she could help him. “He startled and shook his head,” Carr wrote.
Carr called a state police detective to ask him to keep an eye on the vehicle, which had left and didn’t return. Carr described looking up the vehicle license plate number, confirming the registered owner’s photograph matched the driver, and uploading a photo she’d taken of the vehicle to Evidence.com, an AI-powered, cloud-based digital evidence management system.
The following day, June 11, a large protest broke out outside of the ICE Spokane field office. When Carr left work in the afternoon, she observed HSI analyst Ryan Lid “recording license plates from the protesters.”
“There were a couple he could not see,” Carr wrote. “I told him I would get them for him before I left. I regularly work undercover and drive an undercover vehicle. I am not easily recognizable as a police officer and blend well with crowds.”
Carr described driving through the protest and making “a short video to record the license plates,” which she then uploaded to Evidence.com. The police report lists three license plate numbers, descriptions of the vehicles, and the names and addresses of the registered owners, though Carr noted that two of the plate numbers appeared to be inaccurate. “There were enough people and activity that I was not able to safely and discreetly record the plates,” she added.
Evidence.com is owned by Axon Enterprise, the company behind Taser and a leading supplier of police body cameras. A 2025 Mother Jones investigation found at least 21 police departments had used Axon software to turn body camera footage into AI-generated police reports—and in some cases eliminated human oversight.
Last month, CNBC reported that Trump had purchased between $1 million and $5 million worth of Axon Enterprise stock, just two weeks before ICE sought a $220 million Taser contract. Evidence.com has long been used widely by law enforcement agencies—including DHS—but Carr’s report is the first confirmed use of the platform to log the license plate information of protesters.
The report doesn’t distinguish whether Carr was acting in her capacity as a local officer or federal task force agent, but it states that she “shared this information [about the Jeep] with Homeland Security Agents and Washington State Patrol partners in the building.” Lid, meanwhile, is listed in a 2023 document from the state of Washington as an employee of “Homeland Security Investagations/ICE” [sic]. A Spokane Police Department spokesperson said the data uploaded by Carr is only accessible to SPD employees and added that the department is “currently investigating why the detective was engaged in these activities.” ICE did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In recent months, the civil liberties–focused Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) and The Intercept have each filed Freedom of Information Act lawsuits against DHS in an attempt to shed more light on the government’s alleged “domestic terrorism” watchlist of protesters. But Carr’s report highlights that a standalone database need not exist for law enforcement to surveil First Amendment activity, and raises new questions about the government’s use of the Evidence.com system.
FIRE senior attorney Adam Steinbaugh said that “writing down license plates in the context of speech and protests is a throwback to the 1960s era,” when FBI agents would do just that while staking out a “subversive political meeting.”
“When you are recording information about people’s political activities, you know that that is the first step towards acting on that speech,” Steinbaugh said. “And what the government then does with that information can have a real chilling effect.”
On July 24, the Electronic Privacy Information Center and three legal observers filed a First Amendment lawsuit against DHS, alleging the agency has “adopt[ed] a secret Protester Surveillance Policy enabling its agents to first collect records on Americans engaging in First Amendment exercise and then maintain them in DHS systems, where they can be used to retaliate against those Americans.”
