US: Pro-Israel website Canary Mission used to identify students for deportation, says ICE

A senior Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) official on Wednesday told a federal court judge that its investigation of pro-Palestinian student protestors has been largely informed by a pro-Israel website that blacklists academics and students who are critical of Israel.

Peter Hatch, an assistant director for intelligence within ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), which is dedicated to dismantling transnational criminal organisations, testified in a Massachusetts district court that his team had compiled 100 reports based on a list of 5,000 people, “most of whom” came from the doxing website Canary Mission, which is run anonymously. 

Hatch’s testimony was on the Trump administration’s third day of a first major trial of his second term, which has sought to crack down on pro-Palestinian activists on US campuses.

Hatch said the HSI team, dubbed the “Tiger Team”, was comprised of officers who had been drafted from other departments to work on compiling reports.

Trump’s targeting of pro-Palestine voices has led to arrests and efforts to deport university faculty members and foreign-born students.

Hatch said the team obtained names from “many different sources”, which he did not elaborate on, adding that they focused on people who had been involved in student protests at Columbia University and other campuses. The investigations expanded beyond students and faculty to others “who may not have been associated with the university at all”, he said. 

At a briefing of HSI leadership in March, Hatch said that staff were instructed to look for “violations of US laws, including and specific to immigration and customs laws” that may relate to being violent, inciting violence, supporting terrorist organisations, and unlawful activity during protests.

Hatch’s testimony is the first time that the government has admitted it is relying on sites like Canary Mission.

Hatch said the Tiger Team’s focus was based on Trump’s executive order, “Protecting the United States From Foreign Terrorists and Other National Security and Public Safety Threats”.

The executive order aims to deport any international students on university campuses who have expressed pro-Palestinian sentiments or participated in pro-Palestinian demonstrations.

The trial in Massachusetts is expected to end next week and seeks to challenge the Trump administration’s policy of arresting, detaining, and deporting noncitizen students and faculty who participate in pro-Palestinian activism.

The Knight Institute filed the lawsuit against the Trump administration on behalf of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), AAUP’s Harvard, New York University and Rutgers campus chapters, and the Middle East Studies Association.

The lawsuit argues “that the policy chills noncitizens from speaking and, by extension, robs these organizations and their US citizen members of noncitizens’ perspectives on a matter of significant public debate”.

Censorship

Sites like Canary Mission, which have been introduced over the past 20 years, act as blacklists where students, activists, and academics with pro-Palestinian views or those who criticise Israel are levelled with accusations of antisemitism and supporting terrorism. 

Canary Mission says it “documents individuals and organizations that promote hatred of the USA, Israel and Jews on North American college campuses and beyond”. But critics and pro-Palestinian voices say the sites are used to censor or silence their freedom of speech by conflating antisemitism with criticism of Israel, including Jews.

Adina Marx-Apadi, an attorney and justice fellow at the Center for Constitutional Rights, told Middle East Eye that Canary Mission has been “notoriously doxxing, smearing, and seeking to punish the movement for Palestinian rights for years”.

Marx-Apadi has been a victim of the site, which targeted her for her legal work and activism. 

“DHS’s use of Canary Mission as a source of information is an escalation of these tactics of punishment,” she said. “The revelation confirms what we already suspected – complete alignment between this administration and these private groups, as well as coordination and information-sharing between them. And it confirms that the policy of arresting, detaining, and deporting noncitizens for their Palestine solidarity is ideologically motivated.”

The site is also used by Israel to prevent critics of Israel and pro-Palestinian advocates from entering Israel, including Palestinians and Jews, according to critics of the site.

Katherine Franke, who served as a law professor at Columbia University for 25 years, was prevented from entering Israel in 2018 on a trip where she was leading a civil rights delegation.

“I was stopped at Ben Gurion Airport [in Tel Aviv], profiled there, detained and interrogated for 14 hours,” Franke told MEE.

“The security officials were interrogating me. They had their phone open, and my Canary Mission profile was what they were looking at. I turned to the security guy who was doing this, and I told him: ‘I worry for the Israeli people that you have outsourced your national security intelligence to a patently unreliable smear website. I understand that Israel faces serious security threats, but it’s shocking to me that this is what you’re looking at.’ He just laughed at me”.

“I think it proves that what’s really afoot here is a political project about punishing people for exercising constitutionally protected speech, rather than actually worrying about the safety of people in the US,” she added.

Both Franke and Marx-Apadi said that erroneous information was published on the Canary Mission site. 

Students targeted

Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish national who is attending Tufts University and was picked up by ICE in March, is one student who is believed to have been targeted because she was listed on Canary Mission for writing an opinion article in a student newspaper. 

Back in January, the ultra-right-wing Betar, which describes itself as “loud, proud, aggressive and unapologetically Zionist”, said it had sent a list of names of 100 pro-Palestinian students and 20 faculty members that it believed Trump should deport from the US. It is unclear whether ICE used this list to compile its target list.

Multiple students, including Ozturk, Mahmoud Khalil, Badar Khan Suri, Mohsen Mahdawi, and Yunseo Chung, were all targeted by ICE, with Khalil, Ozturk and Suri all being put into detention. They have all been freed since.

Chung and Khalil are fighting ongoing deportation cases, with Khalil seeking restitution by filing on Thursday a $20m lawsuit against the Trump administration for false imprisonment, malicious prosecution and being smeared as an antisemite.