The US Department of Justice has reportedly subpoenaed Reddit and X, asking them for the personal information of at least two users who posted anonymously about ICE, in what seems to be an escalation of the government’s previous efforts to unmask ICE critics. According to Bloomberg, Jeanine Pirro, the US Attorney for the District of Columbia and a close ally of President Trump, sent the subpoenas asking the social media websites for the users’ personal information, including their names, addresses and banking details.
Both users learned about the subpoenas from the websites, which gave them a short window of time to challenge the government’s demands in court, before the companies have to provide whatever information they have to the DOJ. The subpoenas, however, didn’t say what laws their comments had violated exactly.
The New York Times reported back in February that Homeland Security had sent out hundreds of administrative subpoenas to Google, Reddit, Discord and Meta in the preceding months to uncover the identities of ICE critics. Lauren Regan, the lawyer representing the poster on Reddit, says the government did start “with an administrative summons, which does not indicate a criminal investigation, and then progressed to the grand jury subpoena, which does.” She said that it was “further proof that this is a bad faith attempt to unmask the user.” As Bloomberg notes, grand jury subpoenas are difficult to fight off, with recipients having to prove that they’re oppressive before the judge can throw them out.
Regan defended her client, saying that most of their posts simply read “[expletive] ICE.” The post that she suspects caught the attention of authorities referenced the ICE officer who killed Renee Good in Minnesota and where the officer had lived. Joshua Koltun, the lawyer who represents the user from X, said his client made a sarcastic post about donating to the ICE officer who shot Good, along with their address that could already be found elsewhere. “The post does not contain a trace or an inkling that any violence was intended,” he said. Like in the case of Regan’s client, Homeland Security withdrew its original administrative summons for information on Koltun’s client, and the DOJ then issued X a grand jury subpoena.
Before going after individual ICE critics, the US government first went after apps that tracked the movement of ICE officers. One of them was ICEBlock, which climbed to the top of the App Store charts in mid-2025, after officials publicly slammed it and called more attention to its existence. A few months later, in October, both Apple and Google had removed the app from their stores after the Trump administration demanded their takedown. In April this year, a couple of other anti-ICE groups that faced takedown demands won a preliminary injunction to stop the Trump administration from forcing platforms to take their projects down.
More recently, the Trump administration reportedly added what it calls “anti-technology extremists” to its list of domestic surveillance targets. According to Wired, the administration warned federal agencies and local law enforcements that the growth of AI “may fuel large-scale protests that devolve into civil unrest and anti-tech violent extremist activity, especially in large urban areas such as New York City.”
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