In Minnesota, people came up with a phrase for something that kept happening to neighbors who filmed immigration agents in public.

They called it "being driven home by ICE."

You would follow agents at a safe distance, recording what they did — something every American has the right to do. And then, somehow, the agents would end up leading you back to your own house. Not their destination. Yours. So you'd know they knew where you live.

That phrase now appears in a federal lawsuit filed Friday, July 24, 2026, in the Southern District of California.

What the lawsuit says

Three people who observed immigration enforcement, along with the Electronic Privacy Information Center, are suing the Department of Homeland Security. They say DHS broke a federal privacy law, violated administrative law, and trampled the First Amendment.

Their basic argument is simple. As the suit puts it, these Americans "did what anyone is supposed to do when they disagree with government action: They exercised their First Amendment rights" — assembling, protesting, and recording DHS agents working in public.

And then, the suit says:

"In response, DHS decided to record the Americans who were peacefully observing its agents."

According to the complaint, ICE and Border Patrol agents used facial recognition technology, license plate readers and other tools to identify the people watching them. Then they used what they learned.

Federal officers addressed legal observers by name — people they had never spoken to. In Minnesota, observers following agents by car would routinely be led back to their own home addresses.

That's where the phrase came from.

The policy that quietly disappeared

Here's a detail in the suit that deserves more attention than it will get.

DHS had a 2023 policy governing how it uses facial recognition. The lawsuit says the department is no longer following it.

It also says DHS quietly removed that policy from its website during President Trump's first month back in office — and left it out even from the archived versions of its pages.

The complaint argues that deleting the rules amounted to a policy change. And under the Administrative Procedure Act, agencies can't just change policy in the dark. There's a process. The suit says DHS skipped it.

An agency doesn't erase its own limits on facial recognition by accident.

The punishment: your place in line at the airport

The retaliation described in the suit is almost mundane, which is part of what makes it effective.

DHS allegedly revoked people's status in its trusted traveler programs — TSA PreCheck and Global Entry.

Nicole Cleland, a Minnesota woman and one of the plaintiffs, says her Global Entry status was revoked three days after an encounter with a Border Patrol agent she had been following at a safe distance.

Think about how that works as a message. Nobody arrests you. Nobody charges you with anything. You just find out that a benefit you had has vanished, days after you exercised a constitutional right, with no explanation and nobody to appeal to who'll tell you why.

The other two plaintiffs, Jacquelyn Ivey of South Carolina and Anna Walker of California, said the encounters left them with "fear, anxiety and emotional distress." The suit also describes similar activity in Maine, North Carolina and Chicago.

Two people are dead

This is not happening in a vacuum, and the lawsuit doesn't pretend otherwise.

It describes a nationwide surge in immigration enforcement in which federal agents have shot and killed protesters, observers and immigrants.

In Minneapolis in January, officers with DHS agencies killed two observers — Renee Good and Alex Pretti — in incidents 17 days apart.

That's the context for everything above. People started showing up to watch precisely because agents were killing people. And the suit says the government's answer to being watched was to scan their faces, learn their names, follow them home, and quietly take away their travel benefits.

Did it work?

The lawsuit says the goal was a "chilling effect" on protected speech. On at least one person, it worked exactly as intended.

Cleland has stopped observing DHS operations entirely, for fear of what else might happen to her.

That is the whole point of retaliation. You don't have to prosecute people. You just have to make enough of them decide it isn't worth it.

What DHS says

These are allegations in a lawsuit, and the government disputes them. That deserves to be stated plainly.

A spokesperson for Customs and Border Protection, which runs Global Entry, told reporters that trusted traveler status can be denied for "inability to demonstrate low-risk traveler status."

"Global Entry or other CBP Trusted Traveler Program memberships are not revoked because someone exercises their First Amendment rights," the spokesperson wrote.

CBP said membership can be pulled for reasons like criminal activity, pending charges or warrants, or customs and immigration violations. It noted that people can request additional review, that an ombudsman provides oversight in some cases, and that losing Global Entry doesn't stop anyone from traveling.

But note what DHS did not answer. The department did not respond to questions about its policies for recording or using facial recognition on observers — the core allegation in the case.

Why this should worry you even if you never protest anything

You may never film an immigration raid. This still matters to you.

The right to watch the government work in public is not a fringe activity. It is the mechanism by which we find out what our government is actually doing. Nearly everything the public knows about how these operations have gone — including how people died — we know because someone was standing there with a phone.

If the price of holding up that phone is that federal agents scan your face, learn your address, drive you home, and take away benefits without ever charging you with a crime, then the watching stops. And when the watching stops, so does the evidence.

A government that can't be recorded is a government that can't be checked.

Source

• Jacob Fischler, "Suit alleges Homeland Security targeted people observing, protesting immigration agents", States Newsroom / Florida Phoenix, July 26, 2026. Photo of federal agents on patrol in Minneapolis by Nicole Neri/Minnesota Reformer.