The Pipeline From Zionist Lists To ICE Arrests, Revealed

Edited by Sam Thielman

IN MARCH, when Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) began snatching pro-Palestinian activists off the streets, FOREVER WARS wrote that the lists of allegedly scary Muslims that Islamophobic groups compiled during the War on Terror were primed to feed a deportation machine. This week, a federal lawsuit compelled a senior ICE intelligence official to confirm that's exactly what ICE has been doing. 

Peter Hatch, the assistant director of the Office of Intelligence within Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), a component of ICE, revealed that after a meeting in March called by senior ICE leaders "to talk about protest activity or student protesters who may be in violation of U.S. law," his analysts generated somewhere between 100 and 200 reports on protesters for Palestine. 

To compile those intelligence reports, known as Reports of Analysis (ROA), a special analytical "Tiger Team" was instructed—Hatch was cagey about who gave the instruction—to look at the McCarthyite lists of campus activists for Palestine kept on the website of the Zionist organization Canary Mission. And not only Canary Mission's lists, but also those kept by the Jabotinskyite would-be street thugs of Betar. Betar, last seen soiling itself in fear of Zohran Mamdani, has boasted about bringing Mahmoud Khalil to the attention of the Trump administration. While Hatch didn't specifically confirm that ICE learned about Khalil from Betar, he confirmed that ICE indeed acts upon the lists kept by those extremist Zionist groups. 

While an ROA doesn't automatically lead to an arrest, they feed into the process for one. Hatch described the ROAs going to ICE's National Security Division for a decision on taking action based on them, and from there to the State Department. And most chillingly, Hatch revealed that pure speech on behalf of Palestine, rather than the commission of any act of violence, can get written up into an ICE intelligence report. 

Early in his Wednesday testimony, Hatch said that ICE intelligence analysts look for "violations of primarily criminal law but violations of law, and for HSI's mission, violations of immigration and customs law, which is our speciality." But as lawyers pressed him further, Hatch revealed that statements like "Hamas is right" or "Free Palestine"—it was rendered in the transcript as "free Palestinian," but I'm gathering that was a typo—"could be" included in a Tiger Team's intelligence report on someone, "depending on the circumstances of that individual." As long as the statement is "factual"—that is, the targeted person said it—"the analyst would not be against policy in including that in the Report of Analysis." 

Hatch, clearly testifying reluctantly, has been at HSI since 2019. Prior to this year, he testified, "I don't recall any instance when I was asked to review protest activity." 

Canary Mission's list contains the names of 5,000 people. Friends of mine are on these lists. Young people who never have hurt anyone are on these lists. The point of compiling such lists, I wrote in March, is not only the disappearances and deportations, but "to make everyone else who supports those causes think long and hard before making themselves visible."

But there can be no backing down, especially not now that we know the role of these lists in the deportation machine. First and foremost, that's because Palestinians have the right to exist safely and freely. And then because this is the machinery of fascism, a first-order threat to anyone's liberty, as it will never, ever be satisfied by swallowing up its initial targets. This is exactly the warning I wrote REIGN OF TERROR to sound. It's why we need to abolish not only ICE, but all of DHS. 

The "Big Beautiful Bill" that congressional Republicans passed last week and President Trump signed into law last week throws so much money into the disappearance/deportation apparatus as to transform the enterprise. As it scales up, and as its leaders demand greater numbers of arrests and deportations, we should expect the machinery of mass deportation to rely more and more on adjuncts like Canary Mission and Betar. 

Hatch noted at one point that "most of the time, it's a special agent who is asking the investigative analyst for help in finding more information out about an individual." For both the ICE special agent and the analyst, these pre-made lists flagging speech on behalf of Palestine for ICE to criminalize make the process of mass deportation that much more efficient. The rest of us are supposed to overlook the Nazi parallels among those who create the lists, those who turn them into ICE intelligence products, and those in masks who grab people off the streets or at their mandatory immigration-court check-ins. 

We're surely just scratching the surface of the disappearance/deportation machine. But there is going to be more to come from this lawsuit, known as American Association of University Professors v. Rubio. Per an email from the Knight Institute, today in court—I was working today on my book and the transcript isn't publicly available yet—testimony established that the files ICE compiled on Rümeysa Öztürk included her Tufts student newspaper op-ed on behalf of Gaza, and that Khalil's included his Canary Mission listing. Tomorrow, the court is expected to hear from State Department officials about their role in the process, given Secretary of State-Plus Marco Rubio's March invocation of a section of the Immigration and Nationality Act empowering his office to expel foreigners on "national security" grounds. You know, like a school newspaper op-ed. 

The case arose because "students and faculty all over the country are quite literally terrified about the possibility that their advocacy and expression will lead to detention," according to one of the lawyers behind it, the Knight Institute's Jameel Jaffer. I got that quote from Jameel's interview yesterday with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now, which is worth checking out. For nearly 25 years, he's been one of the leading lawyers fighting against the War on Terror, and has driven a lot of exposure of its operations, so it's no surprise he's on this case as well.