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brennan center for justice
Rights Groups Warn FBI Probe of Anti-ICE Activity Portends New Crackdown on Lawful Dissent
"People who are entirely innocent of any wrongdoing can be subjected to surveillance or investigation," said one critic of the FBI memo. "That imposes stigma."
Dec 19, 2025
Rights groups are expressing alarm over new reporting about the FBI carrying out nationwide anti-terrorism probes against activists protesting against federal immigration enforcement officers.
The Guardian on Friday published a report detailing an internal FBI document that outlines "criminal and domestic terrorism investigations” into “threats against immigration enforcement activity” in 23 regions across the US.
The FBI document, which was dated November 14, is a response to National Security Presidential Memorandum-7 (NSPM-7), a directive signed by President Donald Trump in late September that demanded a “national strategy to investigate and disrupt networks, entities, and organizations that foment political violence so that law enforcement can intervene in criminal conspiracies before they result in violent political acts."
The FBI report cites two violent attacks against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facilities in Texas to argue that there has been "an escalation in violence compared to past attacks, which primarily resulted in property damage."
Additionally, the FBI report directs agents to look for "indicators" that an anti-ICE activist may be planning to carry out an attack on immigration enforcement officials, including "stockpiling or distributing firearms," as well as using encrypted messaging apps and "conducting online research" about immigration agents' movements and locations.
The last two of these three "indicators" are raising red flags for rights groups, which are warning that they could be used as the pretext for mass infringement of constitutional rights to speak freely and protest peacefully.
Rachel Levinson-Waldman, director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, told the Guardian that the FBI appeared to be treating US citizens with suspicion for engaging in activities protected by the First Amendment.
"It is not illegal to do online research about the publicly available movements of government officers or to communicate through encrypted apps like Signal or WhatsApp," she said. "While the document refers to using encrypted communications to ‘discuss operational planning’, that term is undefined and ambiguous, leaving it open what kinds of conversations might draw FBI scrutiny."
Hina Shamsi, director of the ACLU National Security Project, expressed concern to the Guardian that the FBI document is "infused with vague and over-broad language, which was exactly our concern about NSPM-7 in the first place."
"It invites law enforcement suspicion and investigation based on purely First Amendment-protected beliefs and activities," Shamsi explained. "People who are entirely innocent of any wrongdoing can be subjected to surveillance or investigation. That imposes stigma. It can wrongly immesh people in the criminal legal system."
Adam Goldstein, vice president of strategic initiatives at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), published an analysis on Thursday that criticized a recently unearthed memo from Attorney General Pam Bondi that fleshed out the concepts laid out in NSPM-7.
In particular, Goldstein argued that Bondi's memo risks using law enforcement to investigate people based on their political ideologies rather than on suspicion that they are engaging in criminal activity.
"People who conspire to engage in actual criminal behavior should be investigated, arrested, and prosecuted," Goldstein wrote. "But these memos aren’t narrowly focused on groups that exist for the purpose of ideologically motivated violence, which act to bring about violence; they broadly condemn particular viewpoints and lay a foundation for a government watchlist of American groups which share those viewpoints."
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'Straight-Up Nazi Stuff': Trump Admin Plans to Strip More Naturalized Americans of Citizenship
"Requiring monthly quotas that are 10 times higher than the total annual number of denaturalizations in recent years," said one former immigration official, "turns a serious and rare tool into a blunt instrument and fuels unnecessary fear and uncertainty."
Dec 18, 2025
Policy experts were skeptical Wednesday that the Trump administration could legally or practically carry out its threat to strip more naturalized Americans of their citizenship. Still, they warned that new guidance issued by the White House to immigration officials would ramp up "fear and terror" in immigrant communities and could portend the targeting of naturalized citizens who President Donald Trump views as adversaries.
The guidance was issued Tuesday to US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) field offices, with officers directed to supply the Department of Justice (DOJ) with "100-200 denaturalization cases per month” in the 2026 fiscal year.
The denaturalization process is "deliberately hard" for the federal government, noted American Immigration Council senior fellow Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, and stripping people of the citizenship is a rare step only taken in cases of fraud when they applied to be a citizen or in other narrow circumstances.
As such, between 2017-25, there have been just over 120 denaturalization cases filed with the Office of Immigration Litigation at the DOJ.
Under the first Trump administration, denaturalization cases peaked at 90 in one year in 2018, and the directive issued Tuesday signaled the White House is aiming for a far bigger escalation as it also continues its mass deportation operation and blocks people from seeking asylum as they are permitted to under international law.
Reichlin-Melnick called the directive for a denaturalization quota "vicious and cruel," and pointed out that the president is asking USCIS and the DOJ to take on an onerous task.
"These cases are hard to file and win, and require a lot of DOJ resources, and the DOJ is stretched thin already. So we’ll see; I have serious doubts about their ability to do this," said Reichlin-Melnick.
USCIS refers cases to the DOJ, which must prove in a federal court that it has "unequivocal evidence" that someone obtained their citizenship illegally or fraudulently.
"The Supreme Court has repeatedly stated that citizenship and naturalization are too precious and fundamental to our democracy for the government to take it away on their whim. Instead of wasting resources digging through Americans’ files, USCIS should do its job of processing applications, as Congress mandated,” Amanda Baran, a former senior USCIS official who served during the Biden administration, told the New York Times.
Naturalized Americans account for 26 million people in the US, with 800,000 people sworn in last year. In most cases, a person who loses their citizenship status is classified as a legal permanent resident.
Trump has repeatedly called to denaturalize Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and to deport her over her criticism of his policies, and has made the same threat against New York Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist.
In those threatened cases, wrote Michael Waldman, president and CEO of the Brennan Center for Justice, earlier this month, "it appears that crime isn’t so much a motivation as disloyalty."
"Stripping citizens of their citizenship in the name of making the electorate more 'American' is arguably one of the most un-American acts imaginable," wrote Waldman. "We are a nation of immigrants and also a nation of laws. The courts must continue to ensure that those laws protect naturalized citizens from being punished for speaking out."
Three other Brennan Center experts also recently wrote about the history of denaturalization efforts in the US, including during the "Red Scare" of the 1950s:
Sen. Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin led witch hunts, with denaturalization often used as a tool against accused communists or sympathizers. Among those targets was Harry Bridges, an Australian-born, nationally known labor leader accused of being a communist, who faced an ultimately unsuccessful campaign to revoke his citizenship. The Supreme Court ruled in his favor, not once, but twice.
"This is straight-up Nazi stuff and I’m calling on my fellow Jewish Americans who know where this can lead to be in the vanguard against it," said Dylan Willams, vice president for government affairs at the Center for International Policy, also noting that the influential American Israel Public Affairs Committee has endorsed Rep. Randy Fine (R-Fla.), who has called for the denaturalization and expulsion of Muslim Americans and immigrants.
Sarah Pierce, a former USCIS official, told the Times that Trump's quota for denaturalization cases "risks politicizing citizenship revocation" as it has been in the past.
“And requiring monthly quotas that are 10 times higher than the total annual number of denaturalizations in recent years," she said, "turns a serious and rare tool into a blunt instrument and fuels unnecessary fear and uncertainty for the millions of naturalized Americans.”
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Watchdog Fears Supreme Court Will Continue to ‘Rubber-Stamp’ Authoritarian Trump Actions in New Term
Accountable.US executive director Tony Carrk said the Supreme Court has "regularly abetted President Trump’s unlawful power grab and indulged his anti-constitutional impulses."
Oct 02, 2025
With a new term kicking off for the US Supreme Court on Monday, an anti-corruption watchdog group is sounding the alarm about several cases that may "rubber-stamp" President Donald Trump's attempts to further erode the rule of law and consolidate more authority over the federal government.
In a statement published Thursday, Tony Carrk, the executive director of the group Accountable.US warned that during Trump's first nine months in power, the high court's 6-3 conservative majority has "regularly abetted President Trump’s unlawful power grab and indulged his anti-constitutional impulses, which has enriched himself, his family, and his wealthy allies at the expense of everyday Americans while eroding our rights, freedoms, and protections."
He fears the court may do so again as it hands down new, highly consequential rulings. Some cases it plans to decide in the new term will determine whether Trump can use emergency powers to enact tariffs without Congress' approval and fire heads of independent federal agencies, including Federal Reserve Gov. Lisa Cook, without cause.
These cases are all on the latest so-called "shadow docket," by which the court issues emergency rulings without providing a public rationale for its decisions. Since his second term began, Trump has flooded the shadow docket with an unprecedented number of cases.
Georgetown University law professor Steve Vladeck found that in just the first 20 weeks of Trump’s second term, the administration sought emergency action by the court 19 times—the same number of requests made by the Biden administration over four years.
"On issues ranging from dismantling the Department of Education to banning transgender people from serving in the military, federal trial judges from across the ideological spectrum have repeatedly blocked actions by the administration, only for the Supreme Court to halt those rulings with little or no explanation," explained Alicia Bannon, the director of the judiciary program at the Brennan Center for Justice.
Adam Bonica, a political science professor at Stanford University, described the Supreme Court as being "in open conflict with the lower courts over cases involving the Trump administration." Between May 1 and June 23, he found, "federal district courts... ruled against the administration 94.3% of the time. The Supreme Court, however, has flipped that outcome, siding with the administration in 93.7% of its cases (15 out of 16)."
Carrk noted that these new cases "come on the heels of the court’s decision in Trump v. United States last year, which granted Trump broad immunity for unchecked abuses of power at the highest levels of government. This considerable expansion of presidential power arguably emboldened him to take even more extreme, accelerated actions."
Trump is also expected to add other cases to the shadow docket as the term progresses. On Sunday, ABC reported that Trump has requested that the court make an expedited decision on his order ending the constitutional protection of birthright citizenship.
The conservative justices signaled that they may be sympathetic to overturning birthright citizenship when they ruled in June that lower courts could not issue nationwide injunctions to stop its enforcement. Since then, three more federal judges have ruled the order unconstitutional.
The new term will come as the American public increasingly doubts the Supreme Court's evenhandedness. A Gallup poll published Wednesday found that 43% of Americans believe that the court is "too conservative." While this was the highest proportion ever recorded, it has held roughly steady since 2022, when the court overturned Roe v. Wade, which has allowed many states to severely restrict or outright ban abortion.
Approval of the court has plummeted more generally over the past five years. In 2020, just two months before the death of the liberal justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, 58% of Americans approved of the job the Supreme Court was doing. Now just 42% say they approve of the court, just slightly up from the 39% nadir recorded in July, which was the lowest level of support the court had received in Gallup's 25-year trend.
"As the court’s new term kicks off, Carrk concluded, all eyes will be on its conservative majority to show that they’re capable of standing up for our rights, freedoms, and the Constitution, or they will further risk undermining their legitimacy and waning trust among the American public."
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