Among the many ways President Trump’s immigration cops can identify its targets, one lesser-known technique is surveillance on WhatsApp.
While this isn’t new to Trump’s second term, a recently-unsealed search warrant has shed light on just how the current Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency uses it.
Per the warrant, in mid-2024, under the Biden administration, the Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) division in ICE secured a “pen register” order on the WhatsApp account of a Guatemalan woman who had illegally entered the country four times in the previous decade and was believed to be selling fake identification documents. Such pen registers don’t allow the government to peep on private communications (which are encrypted), but do allow it to collect metadata on a given WhatsApp account, such as who the target communicated with and when. Identifying individuals with that metadata alone appears to be simple enough for the ICE unit.
In this case, an HSI investigator ran the numbers the suspect had chatted with on WhatsApp through a number of unspecified databases. “I was able to possibly identify the majority of the people with whom Ayala was communicating with on WhatsApp during this small time frame,” an HSI agent wrote in the warrant. (Meta hadn't commented at the time of publication.)
One of those turned out to be another person accused of selling IDs, including fraudulent lawful permanent resident and Social Security cards. He was located, arrested and charged in September this year. It’s possible the government can now also map out who was buying that second suspect’s IDs, enabling them to track more undocumented immigrants.
The warrant reviewed by Forbes, filed towards the end of last week, now allows the government to force unlock that suspect’s phone by applying the defendant’s fingerprints to the device, or holding up the phone to their face, depending on what, if any, biometric access features they’re using.
As Forbes previously reported, one issue with such pen registers is that they require the government to provide much less detail to support a finding of probable cause. Privacy advocates say they could be abused, enabling overly broad surveillance on at-risk communities. Court dockets show hundreds of pen register orders filed this year that remain under seal across U.S. states, from Texas to Florida to New York.
One company that continues to profit from such a widespread form of surveillance is PenLink, a Nebraska-based company founded by little-known entrepreneur Mike Murman, which helps agencies like ICE and the FBI set up pen registers. It’s also providing a social media surveillance tool once banned by Facebook. Per a $25 million contract it currently has with ICE, the company gives the agency the ability to “monitor and analyze voice, text and web communications.”
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