Donald Trump’s ICE is doing exactly what he wants. And now they are holding a political prisoner for nearly a year in an ICE detention camp simply because 33-year-old Leqaa Kordia dared to champion views the Trump regime opposes. This should concern all Americans especially given the recent warning from concentration camp expert Andrea Pitzer—who explained on my SiriusXM show that history tells the Trump regime building massive ICE detention camps will ultimately be used to imprison political prisoners.
That should not be a surprise to anyone who follows the history of fascist and other right wing regimes. Trump is following the fascist playbook, complete with his own secret police that has terrorized and even killed Americans who defy him. The most glaring example being the murder of Renee Good and Alex Pretti—who were then smeared by Trump officials as “domestic terrorists.”
Shockingly, we just learned that Trump’s ICE shot and killed another US citizen, 23 year old Ruben Ray Martinez, almost a year ago in March of 2025. However, Trump’s secret police covered up their involvement until recent media reports broke the story open. The details surrounding the murder of Martinez–who worked at Amazon–are simply unbelievable with ICE claiming that for some unknown reason this young man with no criminal record suddenly used his car to attack ICE officers.
Beyond that ICE has terrorized American citizens who dared film them—which they are legally entitled to—assaulted protesters and engaged in conduct consistent with an occupying army, not federal agents.
But it’s not ICE acting as a rogue agency—Trump wants them to do this. Trump—like Putin– wants to silence dissent as we’ve seen with his regime targeting all who oppose him from comedians like Jimmy Kimmel to seeking to criminally charge and imprison six Democratic members of Congress for warning members of the military to not follow illegal orders. A grand jury blocked that–at least for now.
That is why the case Leqaa Kordia demands far more attention given it’s a sneak preview of what we can expect from Trump for not just immigrants–but also U.S. citizens. Leqaa is a 33-year-old Palestinian woman with family in Gaza and the United States. Her mother is a US citizen living in Paterson, New Jersey—which is where Leqaa was staying and working as a waitress until she taken by ICE.
Leqaa Kordia
Kordia—who came to the US in 2016 on a student visa and was in the process of seeking permanent residence status via her mother –has no criminal record. The diminutive woman poses no threat to anyone. But to the Trump regime she is dangerous because she participated in peaceful protests advocating for Palestinian humanity. In the case, of Leqaa this issue is very personal in that she has lost nearly 200 relatives in Gaza.
But Leqaa’s case is not about Palestine—nor it is about Israel. Rather, it’s about freedom of speech—and the Trump’s regime targeting those who dare defy them.
How this case began was that in March of 2025, ICE informed Leqaa they wanted to speak to her. In response, she voluntarily appeared at the ICE office in Newark, New Jersey–where she was quickly arrested, thrown into an unmarked van and sent 1,500 miles away to the Prairieland Detention Facility in Texas far from her lawyer and family.
Since then, she has been detained in horrific conditions. As Leqaa detailed in a recent op-ed, the ICE facility she has been held in for nearly a year “is filthy, overcrowded and inhumane.” She slept in a plastic shell “surrounded by cockroaches and only a thin blanket.” And the food quality is so atrocious, it has caused her to vomit resulting in significant weight loss.
Worse, just a few weeks ago she experienced the first seizure of her life, collapsing to the floor. From there, ICE transported her to a hospital where her wrists and legs shackled to her bed for the three days. As she put it, “The entire time I was chained…I felt like an animal.” And simply to be cruel, ICE refused to tell her lawyers or family where she was or her medical condition.
None of this should be happening. As her lawyer Amal Thabateh explained to me, two different immigration judges ruled that Leqaa should be released on bond. But the Trump regime instead invoked a little used procedure to keep her in detention open ended.
To do that, serial liar DHS Secretary Kristi Noem smeared Leqaa as being a “terrorist” sympathizer for expressing concern for Palestinians in Gaza. They even claimed that releasing Leqaa—who again has no criminal record and was living with her US citizen mother in New Jersey–was somehow a threat to our nation. Of course, this is the same Noem who smeared with lies Renee Good and Alex Pretti as “terrorists” to justify their murders so we know she will say anything to defend the Trump regime’s crimes against humanity.
The idea Leqaa is a political prisoner is not just my view. Amnesty International lists her on their website demanding that the US government “release detained protester.” Her case is in the same section on the Amnesty website where they are calling for the release of dissidents in Russia, Belarus and other authoritarian regimes. This is where our nation is now viewed by human rights organizations.
Deeply alarming is that these ICE dentition centers are increasingly become death camps. At least 32 people died in ICE custody in 2025—the highest number in two decades. And in the past six weeks, six people have died in ICE custody including one man killed by ICE agents as they were restraining him. Will anyone be held accountable for this man’s death? That is like asking will anyone be held accountable for the death of Russian dissident Alexei Navalny killed in a Russian prison two years ago. We know that no one will be prosecuted because Russia is an authoritarian nation. As disturbing as it sounds, so is the United States under Trump.
But for those who refuse to submit to Trump and want to stand up for freedom of speech, I hope you will sign the Amnesty International petition calling for the US government to release Leqaa. Other ways to help this young woman include calling on your members of Congress to demand her release. You can also consider making a donation to her online fundraising page to help her and her family. Finally, you can follow Leqaa’s campaign for freedom on Instagram and amplify the updates.
As Andrea Pitzer repeatedly warned in our conversation on concentration camps, it does not end with people like Leqaa. It begins with people like Leqaa being held with in a camp for as long as the regime wants to keep her–in horrific conditions–simply because they want to silence her political views. They then continue until they reach people like us. But as the famous poem goes, by then it’s too late because when “they came for me…there was no one left to speak out.”
——
Below is my recent interview about Leqaa’s wrongful detention with her lawyer Amal Thabateh, who is with Creating Law Enforcement Accountability & Responsibility (CLEAR) Project and Laila El-Haddad, an award-winning Palestinian author, social activist, policy analyst and journalist.
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The international accompaniment movement teaches us that to sustain an emergency response to state violence, we must build durable, collective and supportive structures now.
Targeted state violence and rising fascism are being met with creative organizing by people in Minneapolis and across the country, from mass marches to neighborhood mutual aid to ICE watch foot patrols. These are all beautiful manifestations of resistance that have kept many people safe and demonstrated widespread repudiation of the Trump administration’s policies.
Yet as state-sanctioned violence becomes more coordinated, normalized and national in scope, we must continue adapting our response systems to shifting needs. Emergency response structures set up in moments of crisis can often lead to isolated, reactive decision making with responsibility falling on a few shoulders, creating the conditions for burnout, security failures, movement fragmentation and individual and organizational missteps or even collapse.
Here we can draw on some hard-earned lessons from our predecessors in the decades-long international accompaniment movement, who witness, stand with and provide security support for human rights defenders, communities and activists under attack by authoritarian regimes in Latin America.In response to sometimes devastating losses, accompaniment organizations developed a set of skills and strategies over many years for collaborative, sustainable decision making to respond to security incidents while under conditions of constant threat. We ourselves learned these skills in our many years of working with accompaniment organizations in Guatemala, Honduras and Colombia from 2008 to 2022.
We share here principles and practices from this legacy, which we hope organizations and networks, whether formal or informal, can use to develop emergency response structures that are sustainable, don’t overly burden a few individuals with the difficult decision making, actively build collective capacity and shared analysis, and support skill-building for more people in our movements.
What we present here are suggestions, and we invite you to adapt them to particular organizations and situations. They may take a bit more planning and preparation than may seem available in moments of urgency. But if we want to sustain our movements for what, unfortunately, is likely to be a long struggle, we must begin now to put durable, collective and supportive structures into practice.
1. No one person decides alone
Decision making in emergency security situations is emotionally and mentally taxing. Stress can narrow our literal and metaphorical fields of vision. And because the weight of a decision can be incredibly heavy to bear — especially if things go wrong — no one ever made a decision alone in the accompaniment organizations of which we were a part. We had clearly established protocols for which people, based on their roles in the organization, would come together for specific emergency response decisions.
For example, we established regional subcommittees based on where a security incident occurred. Each subcommittee was composed of a security lead, a representative from the advocacy team and on-the-ground volunteers, who worked together to assess, analyze and respond to emergency situations.
Applying this principle in a U.S. context, organizers of a publicly advertised protest could set a team of folks who gather at an office or a home to monitor social media and news reports for security incidents or threats, and be ready to make decisions about emergency response.
2. Prepare decision-making structures and roles beforehand
Emergency response or crisis moments are when people are most activated and are also the most likely to lead to organizational, interpersonal or movement conflict. This shouldn’t come as a surprise. After all, we are being subjected to situations of prolonged violence directed at ourselves and people we care for. We want to show up in the best way possible, yet often also feel frustration, impotence or rage.
In our accompaniment organizations, we mitigated stress and conflict (to the extent possible) by having clear processes and roles for decision making.
First, we frontloaded as many decisions as possible before an emergency, allowing us to focus on the situation at hand rather than spend time debating who would do what and delaying important support for the impacted individuals. Knowing who is going to be involved in emergency response reduces the need for conversation and shortens the response time.
The Peace Brigade International accompanies the Front of People in Defense of Land and Water in Amilcingo, Mexico. (Facebook/Peace Brigades International)
We have seen this play out in high-risk moments in our accompaniment work. For example, when we responded to nationwide protests that extended over months and saw daily murders of protesters by military and police forces, we set up a rotating decision-making group. Because roles and communication channels had already been agreed upon, colleagues didn’t have to debate who should verify information, call other allied organizations or set up our emergency response protocol. They could simply act.
Second, we made decisions in consensus. While clear decision-making structures are essential, that doesn’t necessarily mean they have to be hierarchical. We’ve found in our accompaniment work that decisions are easier to implement when everyone has a hand in shaping them. A consensus-based decision-making structure keeps any one person from carrying the whole mental load (see “No one person decides alone”) and lets us actually use the full brainpower in the room. We all come with different lived experiences, risk tolerances and ways of thinking, which means we’re bound to catch things others won’t and, luckily, vice versa.
This works best when folks talk it out together and create a clear timeline to decide. In the example above, if the group got stuck, they would start with a quick break to rest and regroup, and if that fails, go to a smaller predesignated subgroup — and, if even that doesn’t work, have a clear fallback decision-maker. Something else we’ve learned: Consensus tends to work better when we trust each other and each other’s criteria, so it helps to make the effort to get to know each other, grab a coffee or go for a walk before the emergencies happen.
3. Some participants in decision making should be offsite
It might seem logical that those directly involved in the emergency response should be onsite, able to see the situation firsthand and respond immediately. In fact, we learned in our accompaniment work that involving folks offsite as advisors or even decision makers can provide essential perspective, bring in crucial information and further spread the decision-making burden.
In one protest scenario, while tensions escalated on the ground, an off-site team a few blocks away tracked both police staging and local news sources and relayed that information back to organizers. This wider view allowed on-the-ground leadership to make informed choices without relying only on what was immediately visible.
4. Rotate the decision makers
Holding a decision-making role in an emergency situation is not easy; it means putting your body on high alert, navigating complex situations and grappling with violence directed at our communities. This, unsurprisingly, takes a toll on us over an extended period of time (more on this below).
Even if we believe we can hold this indefinitely, the reality is that, without moments to regulate our nervous systems, our bodies normalize the constant alertness, making it harder to activate when necessary and to properly analyze what is truly an emergency. We want our emergency decision makers to be well-rested, regulated and connected — for their wellbeing and ours, too.
That’s why we recommend that the decision makers in an emergency situation shift on an agreed-upon rotation. Depending on organizational structure, the best rotation might be every protest or event, or it might be a time period, like a week. This not only gives us a chance to skill up more folks in emergency response (always a benefit for our movements!), but it also gives us decision makers a chance to rest and recharge.
In the protest scenario previously mentioned, once things settled for the day, the people who had been making decisions rotated out. Some went home to sleep; others took quiet time away from phones and updates. A few days later, once they were rested enough to look at what they’d learned and what might need to change next time, they checked back in for the follow-up stage.
5. Institute Urgency Guides
Prolonged emergency situations make it harder over time to accurately recognize urgency. When everything feels critical, true emergencies can become blurred. Clear guidelines help mediate this by providing structure and clarity for decision making under sustained stress. In our accompaniment work, we used the following guidelines to categorize our responses:
On alert (prior to emergency): The situation seems to be escalating. We have seen a few signs indicating the risk level may be increasing (increased presence of armed actors, state or non-state, counter-protesters gathering, surveillance signs, suspected infiltration, etc.). Start to notify the security team (on and offsite) and start to implement increased security measures.
Immediate response (minutes to hours after): The emergency situation is active; the threat has not yet passed and there is potential for the situation to escalate or repeat. The physical and emotional well-being of impacted individuals is prioritized immediately.
Rapid (24 to 48 hours after): The specific situation has passed, but there is potential of it repeating in the near future. This could be because we will go to the same location in the next few days, or the event we are hosting will continue, or the aggressor is still nearby or indicating potential harm to our communities.
Follow-up (a few days to weeks after): The situation has passed. Here we focus on analysis and whether we need to adapt our organizational and movement strategy. This is also a great time to broaden the analysis by including allies in answering questions like: What was the aggressor’s desired impact? Have we seen this strategy used before? What are the increased security measures we may need to implement based on this situation?
We have used this for years in accompaniment spaces, allowing us to clearly mark stages in our response and who had to be involved. For example, when activists we were supporting suffered an assassination attempt, the attention moved from split-second decisions (immediate response) to checking in with impacted participants, ensuring medical attention, locating others who could be targeted next and finding safe houses, to adjusting security plans for the next day and watching for signs the situation might flare up again (rapid response). Later still, the group circled back to look at what had happened and what it meant going forward (follow up).
6. Establish ways to take care of yourself and your team before and after taking on decision-making roles.
When stepping into an emergency response decision-making role, it is essential to shore up your emotional resources before an emergency and repair your heart and mind afterward. This will look different for everyone, but all organizations and networks should dedicate time and space for everyone involved in emergency response to do this. You might employ the same tools for shoring up and for repairing: They could include a nice walk with your dog, tea with a close friend, reading a good book or taking a bath.
Whatever you need to rest and recharge, identify those activities and build them into your plans. We know this is hard, and to be clear, this level of care has not always been consistently present within accompaniment organizations; its absence often contributes to rapid turnover and diminished response capacity. Naming this matters. After more than a decade of collective work in emergency accompaniment, we have seen clearly that constant crisis response is not sustainable if people’s nervous systems are never given real opportunities to rest and regulate.
This is why we believe it is so important to speak directly about intentional, collective care practices not as an ideal, but as a necessary condition for the longevity and effectiveness of accompaniment and emergency response itself.
We don’t need to reinvent the wheel
These tools aren’t a panacea for the real risks presented by escalating state violence. They won’t stop all arrests, injuries, raids, deportations or assassinations. They won’t undo the harm already done or bring back the people we’ve lost. But the more we incorporate skillful emergency response tools into our repertoire, the more we can stay connected to one another under pressure, reduce preventable harm, and keep showing up again and again without burning out, fragmenting or turning on each other.
None of this work is new. We are drawing from the accumulated knowledge of mentors, organizers, human rights defenders, journalists, accompaniers, medics, lawyers and movement elders who have spent decades responding to fascist and authoritarian governments across regions and generations. From underground networks resisting military dictatorships, to civil rights organizers facing state-sanctioned terror, Indigenous land defenders, abolitionists, anti-colonial movements and transnational solidarity networks, people have long been building collective security, emergency response and care structures under conditions that mirror in many ways what we are facing now.
Luckily, this means we don’t have to reinvent the wheel. We just need to know how to look to the past, to other contexts and to each other for guidance and support. The more intentional we are,the better we’ll be able to keep up the struggle so that, one day soon, we will not just have survived fascism but defeated it.
I feel like it’s been a while since we’ve checked in on Monica Cole and the “One Million Moms” that are definitely in the room with her right now as we speak, but this one was just too good to pass up. As many of you may know, I am originally from the Massachusetts/Rhode Island area, and am thus possessed of a certain fondness for Dunkin’ Donuts. Especially since they started carrying coffee milk, the only kind of milk I will drink on its own because I am not a freak like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Kid Rock.
It’s like chocolate milk but coffee flavored and it is magical, thank me later.
Anyway! The One Million Moms are very upset about a Dunkin’ Donuts ad that features Megan Thee Stallion, on account of how it is just too sensual.
Let us watch!
If you are a normal human person, you are probably thinking that this is nothing and pretty much as wholesome as a Dunkin’ Donuts ad featuring Megan Thee Stallion could possibly be.
If you are Monica Cole, however, you are thinking:
One Million Moms has received complaints regarding the new ad campaign from Dunkin’ Donuts. The “Dunk N’ Pump” commercial features Megan Thee Stallion, aka hot-girl coach, Pro-Tina, launching the new Protein Refreshers. Unfortunately, the offensive ad also features a vulgar workout routine full of sexual innuendos with an extremely sensual message.
Megan wears a thong skimpy leotard with flesh-colored leggings in this disgusting ad along with the “backup performers” wearing similar outfits. While sipping on a Dunkin’ Protein Refresher, they perform inappropriate and crude moves and the commercial ends with Megan performing the splits.
This type of advertising is entirely unnecessary. Dunkin’ has deliberately chosen to produce controversial advertisements instead of wholesome ones.
Apparently, Dunkin’ executives do not care how damaging and destructive such ads are to our children. Everyone knows kids repeat what they hear and see. This ad demonstrates weak marketing, and Dunkin’ should have the corporate responsibility not to use an age-old euphemism that offends families.
Let them know that, as a parent and a consumer, you are disgusted by their recent irresponsible marketing choices.
Dunkin’ needs to know that parents disapprove!
Man, they are really, really running out of material if this is the most sensual ad they can find to complain about.
What is it she’s worried about? That “kids repeat what they hear and see?” That they will start wearing thong leotards, which do not even come in children’s sizes?
For the record, as I (by strange coincidence) mentioned Friday, I watched this episode of Saved By The Bell approximately 17,000 times as a child and never once purchased a thong leotard or sported mall bangs.
What battle will they be fighting next? The war on the Jane Fonda Workout?
Honestly, this ad is so innocuous that I am convinced that One Million Moms is just trying to take up newly minted MAGA weirdo Nicki Minaj’s beef with Megan as a bizarre show of solidarity. They’ve been really scraping the bottom of the barrel lately. The last commercial they were upset about was the State Farm Super Bowl ad featuring Danny McBride and Keegan-Michael Key, because it “features the scantily clad girl-group KATSEYE dancing provocatively.” For approximately two seconds.
As if that’s the most annoying State Farm ad anyone’s ever seen.
Sadly for Monica Cole, Elmore City, Oklahoma — the inspiration for the movie Footloose — rescinded its ban on dancing some time in the late ‘90s. However! The town of Purdy, Missouri, reportedly still has one on books, so she can just move there and live a life free of dancing, without having to bother anyone else.
A 5-year-old girl detained in Dilley drew herself and her family trapped in a cage.Credit: Courtesy / Eric Lee
A 9-year-old girl detained in Dilley’s South Texas Family Residential Center says she wants to die, according to family attorney Eric Lee, who recently went viral when a protest erupted inside the facility as he tried to visit his clients.
“The 9-year-old has expressed that she wishes she was no longer alive,” Lee said in a Wednesday phone interview with the Current.
Lee said the mother conveyed her child’s alarming wish to him in a recent a phone call from within the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility an hour southwest of San Antonio, which houses over 1,400 people, including hundreds of children.
Lee represents a family of five, consisting of the 9-year-old along with 5-year-old twin sisters, a 16-year old brother, an 18-year-old sister and her mother. All are Egyptian citizens, and all have had birthdays inside the facility. The minors are not named in this article to protect their identities.
The family, which immigrated from Kuwait, has been detained in Dilley for eight months for what Lee calls “political retribution” from the Trump administration for the alleged crimes of the family’s patriarch, Mohamed Soliman. Soliman became a suspect in an anti-Semitic attack in Boulder, Colorado last June using Molotov cocktails and a makeshift flamethrower.
The attack left seven people injured. One 82-year-old woman died from injuries relating to the attack 24 days later. Soliman received 12 counts of federal hate crime and 118 state criminal charges.
When the attack occurred, Soliman had been estranged from the family for at least a year, living in his car over an hour away and working as an Uber driver, according to Lee. Soliman only saw his family once a week at most, the attorney added, saying they had no knowledge of his plans. The family has spoken out condemning the attack and the mother, Hayam El Gamal, is now seeking a divorce.
Over the months of detainment, their mental health has deteriorated, Lee said.
On a previous visit, the 9-year old daughter gave Lee a picture she drew inside Dilley. The drawing is of the Colorado house she hasn’t seen in the months she’s been in detention.
A 9-year-old child detained in Dilley for months drew this picture of her one-time home.Credit: Courtesy / Eric Lee
One of the five-year-old twins also gave Lee a drawing, which depicts her and her family in a cage. She told Lee that she had a dream that she was trying to run away from a wild animal.
“But she’s stuck in a cage and can’t get out,” Lee said.
The family’s younger kids also have begun skipping meals, “which they hadn’t been doing before,” Lee added.
People detained at the Dilley site have complained that the food inside sometimes is served with bugs, worms and mold. Lee described the water there as “putrid.”
The 16-year-old boy at one point suffered from appendicitis and was told to simply take a pain reliever before collapsing and being rushed to the hospital.
“He could have died,” Lee said.
But, if deported, the family could face certain death in Egypt, Lee claims, for cooperating with the FBI and speaking out against their patriarch.
The Detroit attorney says after months of detention, the Soliman family’s optimism began to rapidly decline in January.
“They really believed that the immigration judge was going to give them a fair hearing after he granted them bond in September,” Lee said. “And so they were hopeful, they were hopeful that they were going to be released through that process, and they weren’t.”
Meanwhile, even the older siblings have shown signs of worsening mental health, despite attempting to hold it together for their family, the attorney added.
“[T]he 16 year old, who’s been kind of, you know, rock solid, taking on the role of man of the house — his attitude has really begun to change,” Lee said. “And that goes for all of them.”
The oldest daughter, Habiba Soliman, was separated from her family once she turned 18 as punishment for talking to the press, Lee asserted. Separated from her family, she’s also been denied religious exemptions, he added.
“They’ve been calling me less in the last week or so, which I think is because they’re just sort of despondent and depressed,” Lee said of his clients. “That’s been the goal from the start, to ruin these children’s lives. And they didn’t do anything.”
U.S. District Judge Fred Biery, who wrote the fiery opinion releasing 5-year-old Minneapolis boy Liam Conejo Ramos from the same facility, will consider the family’s third habeas case, but Lee doesn’t know when.
“It’s a deplorable situation. There’s really no silver lining,” Lee added.
Ron has not said much but I know he is not pleased because I waited too late to cook and heat up the bags of french fries and chicken parts. But even if I did I couldn’t eat a bite. In a few minutes I will soon go to bed. Sorry for not posting more. I have to carefully check my blood sugar to inject the correct amount of insulin. I respect and love those who come here with love and acceptance in their being. So very soon I am going to bed. But I have to do better. Hugs
and wondering about the little internet anomalies that happened here after I sent a very nice letter to Sec. Noem about a young woman being detained for protesting, who’s starving to illness because halal food is not provided in her detention facility. You all know me; of course I made it very polite and non-confrontational. I had a few concerns for a bit, then let it go, slept, did yesterday only wondering a bit now and then, but nothing happened. Then this morning, I see this article. sigh I really hate posting this because I’m always encouraging people to write and direct our government, and this is certainly dis-encouraging. And discouraging. But necessary for people to know.
Trump’s Department of Homeland Security is weaponizing a little-known legal tool to crack down on free speech — and Big Tech is complying.
n October, a Philadelphia man sent an email to the Department of Homeland Security criticizing a government policy. Hours later, federal agents and local police were banging on his door to interrogate him without a warrant. It feels like something out of a movie, but it’s real.
Today on Lever Time, David Sirota sits down with ACLU attorney Steve Loney, who’s now representing the man involved, to ask some big questions: How are federal agencies obtaining your private data without a warrant? How are tech giants like Google enabling them? And what should you do if the feds come knocking on your door?
Or read the transcript (as I’m doing.) Part of it below, then the rest on the page.
TRANSCRIPT
Following is an automated, unedited transcription of this episode. The text may contain grammatical or spelling errors, especially for proper nouns, or attribute text to the wrong speaker. If you plan to quote any part of this transcript, please first confirm that it is correct by listening to the audio.
[00:00:00] David Sirota: From The Lever’s reader, supported newsroom, it’s Lever Time. I’m David Sirota. The idea of civil liberties can seem abstract. Civil liberties are your basic right to speak out, criticize the government and feel free from state sponsored censorship or intimidation. And it’s easy to take civil liberties for granted as if they just exist.
That is, until they become less abstract and more concrete when the government goes full authoritarian against you. In recent months, we’ve seen the Trump administration deploying immigration enforcement agents to violently invade US cities. Killing people is an obvious violation of their civil liberties, to say the least.
But there’s a quieter assault on civil liberties also happening right now. One that can start with you just sending an innocuous email expressing opposition to a government policy, and then end up with federal agents banging on your door and big tech companies threatening to turn all of your digital data over to federal police.
Now, this may sound like science fiction or something happening in a far away country, but today on Lever Time, you’re gonna hear how it’s happening right here in America at a potentially massive scale, and I have some very big questions for the lawyer right in the middle of this battle.
How can a federal agency subpoena your personal data without a judicial warrant? Why are giant tech companies that once sold themselves as protecting customer’s privacy from government intrusion? Why are they now apparently working with the Trump administration to destroy that privacy? And what can you do if you find one of these subpoena threats in your own email inbox? Coming up, my discussion with ACLU attorney, Steve Loney, who tells the harrowing tale of one man being threatened by the government for sending an email opposing ICE’s policy and what they discovered when pushing back against the Trump administration and Big Tech.
Why don’t we start with, um, just who you are, uh, what you do, and anything you think the audience should know. Uh, for purposes of this conversation.
[00:02:22] Steve Loney: My name is Steve Loney. I’m the senior supervising attorney at the A CLU of Pennsylvania. Um, the senior attorney in the Alus Philadelphia office. I am a civil rights attorney, um, one of the last of the generalists.
So if, uh, people’s civil rights are being violated in Pennsylvania, then um, I may be on the case. I have a pretty significant First Amendment docket, which is how I got involved in cases involving people. Having their data subpoenaed by the federal government, and a couple of the most significant or high profile cases have come out of Pennsylvania and activists, uh, in suburban Philadelphia.
[00:02:58] David Sirota: So the story that we’re talking about today starts with a Washington Post article, and I want you to tell me about this article published in late October. Of 2025 detailing how the Trump administration decided to deport a man, a father of two to Afghanistan, where he expected the Taliban to kill him.
Just set the scene here with this article coming out.
[00:03:26] Steve Loney: It started with a man who ended up being our client sitting in the suburbs of Philadelphia reading. This post article in October about the government sort of stripping status for an asylum seeker, somebody who was trying to stay in the United States legally.
Um, so to the extent that all of this debate around immigration is about, you know, trying to find a path to be here illegally, this individual apparently was seeking a path to be here illegally. He had a live asylum application. His asylum claim was based on his legitimate fear that if he returned. To Afghanistan after having helped the United States while he was there.
Then he would suffer retribution, maybe even be killed by the Taliban. So the post published an article about his case where the government was essentially revoking his status and attempting to deport him imminently. And the men ended up being our client. John, and I’ll avoid using his last name because part of the First Amendment issue here is DHS piercing the bail of anonymity for people who are trying to express their abuse anonymously.
John is a naturalized citizen in Pennsylvania who is very politically interested, very upset about what’s happening. Right now, especially as it pertains to immigration. As somebody who was born in another country and worked to become a United States citizen, he read this article and was appalled by the position the government was taking.
In that article, a government lawyer, a United States lawyer from the DOJ was identified as the lawyer identified by name. It’s this is a public servant doing the business of the government in public. So this is not a doxing situation, however people might try to use that term. This is somebody who publicly signed the papers in the Afghanistan refugees case and was identified by the Post.
Our client did a quick Google search, found the government lawyer’s email address listed publicly. Again, I think he found it on his state bar’s website, so he decided to send an email to the government lawyer. It was a very innocuous, non-threatening, just plea for. The government to do the right thing and not let this individual from Afghanistan go home to face torture and death.
[00:05:38] David Sirota: So at this point in, in this story, the Washington Post publishes a story that’s, uh, a pretty tragic story of the Trump administration deporting a guy potentially sending him back to a country where he could get killed. Somebody else reads this story. Sees the, uh, public official quoted emails, the public official, a plea for a different, a different decision.
[00:06:04] Steve Loney: I believe his words were a plea for decency. Apply human decency. That was this. This was the guy’s crime, was to ask a government official to be decent,
[00:06:12] David Sirota: and that gets to this next part, which is a crime, right? That apparently in doing this, the response was to treat the. Guy who sent the email almost as a criminal, what happened next?
[00:06:28] Steve Loney: What happened next was that the government investigated him or started to investigate him as a criminal. Within hours of hitting send on the email, he used his Gmail account to send this email to the government official, and within hours he received a notice on his Gmail account sort of form. Notice from Google saying that we’re waiting to notify you that your data has been requested by a government agency and you have seven days to seek a court order stopping this or else we’re gonna comply and hand over your data to the government.
[00:06:56] David Sirota: This is hours later.
[00:06:57] Steve Loney: Hours
[00:06:57] David Sirota: later, like not, not a few days later, not caught in the spam filter. It’s like sends the email, maybe goes out, does some errands, comes back, checks his email, and he gets this email in his Gmail precisely saying. The government is like knocking down our door. Google’s door demanding your data,
[00:07:13] Steve Loney: right?
And Google’s not gonna step up and try to resist this. Google’s not gonna look into whether this is a legitimate government inquiry. Google is putting the onus on this individual who all he did was send a two line email to navigate federal courts and figure out what motion to file on his own dime. To stop this train or else Google’s gonna comply with the subpoena.
[00:07:34] David Sirota: This subpoena, to be clear, is known as an administrative subpoena. So just for people who hear this term, it’s not like the government went to a judge, got a judge to sign off on a warrant, like in a couple of hours, and then sent something to Google. This is something. Different. And I think it’s important for people to understand what an administrative subpoena is as distinct from a, a judicial warrant,
[00:08:00] Steve Loney: right?
And, and a judicial warrant is what you would normally expect to be sought by a prosecutorial entity trying to prosecute or investigate a crime. So, as I said before, they treated him like a criminal, but they didn’t follow the procedures and the guardrails that are in place to protect our rights. In the event that.
A prosecutor wants a warrant to search your stuff. So what they’re doing instead is trying to shoehorn these kinds of requests into administrative subpoenas. So administrative subpoenas are authorized to some extent by statute. So DHS has statutory authority to investigate, essentially, I’m gonna oversimplify, but essentially violations of immigration law or interference with immigration functions.
So if DHS is legitimately. Investigating a violation of the immigration laws. It can issue its own subpoena. It doesn’t have to go to to a judge because it’s not, that is not a criminal process. That or it’s not yet a criminal process, right? So the agency can do agency things through an administrative subpoena, but there are still guardrails and, and a bygone, quaint era of Trump won.
We might’ve expected the tech companies who are under no obligation. This is, this is a big distinction between a criminal search warrant signed by a judge and an administrative subpoena. The recipient of the administrative subpoena, the tech company can actually say no. They can say thanks. No thanks.
And in that past era when tech companies seemed to be more interested in kind of marketing how good of a job they were doing at protecting their users’, privacy would kind of tout that we will push back on these subpoenas. And they did. And there were some cases like this, that back and forth, the administrative subpoena goes to Google or any tech company, they look at it, they realize it’s not a judicially signed warrant.
They say, no thanks. Then the onus is on the government to go to court and they know how to file things in federal court. The onus is on the government to go to court and justify why their investigation is tied to that statutory authority. Right. And it’s so then it’s not on the end user. But things have shifted now in a couple of different ways.
One is we’ve learned that. DHS is overusing these administrative subpoenas.
[00:10:16] David Sirota: How much, like what are we talking about overusing?
ICE nearly kills another child by mistreatment and ignoring their worsening health and healthcare needs. This is so familiar if you remember history. Lack of food, no healthcare, no humanity. Hugs
Children cry, thinking their parents will be taken if ICE follows them home. All because they are brown skinned. Is this the USA? Hugs
A 5-year-old girl detained in Dilley drew herself and her family trapped in a cage.
Scottie's Playtime 