DHS used anonymous pro-Israel site to target activists for deportation, agency says in court
Source: NBC News
July 9, 2025, 6:00 PM EDT
In a rare federal trial Wednesday in which university groups are challenging the Trump administration’s efforts to deport pro-Palestinian activists, the Department of Homeland Security shared how it got the names of some of the students who were targeted for deportation.
During day three of the proceedings in Boston, Peter Hatch, a senior DHS investigations official, said most of the names of student protesters who were flagged to the agency for analysis came from Canary Mission. The anonymous group has published a detailed database of students, professors and others who it says have shared anti-Israel and antisemitic viewpoints.
“Many of the names of the student protesters provided to you for the Office of Intelligence to produce reports of analysis on came from the website Canary Mission?” the judge asked. “It’s true, many of the names, or even most of the names, came from that website,” Hatch, assistant director of the Homeland Security Investigations intelligence office, said in his testimony. “But we were getting names and leads from many different sources.”
Canary Mission said in an email that it has not been working with DHS and pointed out that its database is public. “We have had no contact with this administration or the previous administration,” the group said. The plaintiffs, the Harvard faculty chapter of the American Association of University Professors, the Middle East Studies Association and three other scholar groups, allege the deportations violated the First Amendment.
Read more: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/dhs-used-anonymous-israel-site-target-activists-deportation-agency-say-rcna217814
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