An senior Immigration and Customs Enforcement official testified in federal court on Wednesday that his office had used opaque pro-Israel blacklisting websites to help target international student activists for investigation and possible deportation.
The admission by Peter Hatch, the assistant director of the Homeland Security Investigations department within ICE, appeared to be the first time that an administration official had acknowledged taking cues from the shadowy groups behind the sites, including Canary Mission, which has been accused of doxxing individuals engaged in pro-Palestinian activism.
Mr. Hatch’s testimony came during the third day of trial proceedings in a case that has emerged as a major challenge to the Trump administration’s crackdown on foreign students.
Lawyers representing the academic associations that sued the administration called Mr. Hatch as a witness to bolster their argument that detaining prominent critics of Israel was part of an official policy to chill political speech unaligned with President Trump’s agenda.
The government has denied that any official policy exists. Mr. Trump, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and other administration officials have consistently referred to the pro-Palestinian demonstrations that swept across college campuses in response to the war in Gaza as detrimental to American interests. Mr. Rubio has denounced the campus protests as displays of support for Hamas, whose attacks on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, set off the Israeli campaign in Gaza. The United States considers Hamas a terrorist organization.
Mr. Hatch’s testimony helped considerably to advance what is known about the sudden burst of student arrests that began in March of this year, when half a dozen noncitizen academics — including some of the most visible leaders in the pro-Palestinian movement — were abruptly whisked away by masked immigration officers.
Mr. Hatch said that his office of roughly 1,000 analysts has a mission to “dismantle transnational criminal organizations,” and includes teams whose research supports investigations in areas such as human trafficking and child exploitation.
But in March, Mr. Hatch testified, he formed a “tiger team,” or a specialized task force, to respond to abrupt orders that he rush analysis on thousands of people whose names and identities had been published by Canary Mission.
“It was a list that made accusations or asserted a lot of information like, these protesters are involved in violent activities, are condoning or supporting violence, possibly even terrorist organizations,” Mr. Hatch said, referring to what his team had gleaned from the organization’s website.
The group has said that its goals are to document “hatred of the U.S.A., Israel and Jews.”
Mr. Hatch recalled a March meeting with senior Department of Homeland Security officials in which his office was told to expedite its research and prepare reports that the State Department could use to determine whether to pursue deportations.
“We are in an organization or agency — in a world — where taking months to do things is not acceptable,” Mr. Hatch said.
Pressed for specifics by a lawyer representing one of the academic groups, Mr. Hatch said his office was “getting names and leads from many different sources” and had no formal relationship with Canary Mission.
But he said the team relied on both Canary Mission profiles and a similar list created by another anonymous pro-Israel group, Betar, to provide the names for its investigation, without a firm understanding of the methodology through which individuals came to be included on either record.
During the testimony, Judge William G. Young of the Federal District Court for the District of Massachusetts appeared taken aback by Mr. Hatch’s recollection that the team had been directed to pore over the thousands of individuals profiled by Canary Mission.
“So that’s over 5,000 people, is that right?” Judge Young asked.
“Yes, sir, which shows why we needed a tiger team,” Mr. Hatch said. “A normal division, a normal unit or section or group of analysts operating in a normal organizational construct couldn’t handle that workload.”
Mr. Hatch testified that after the team’s review, between 100 and 200 reports on noncitizen protesters were submitted to the State Department, which would determine whether to detain them.
For months, detained students have said that Canary Mission’s site provided immigration agents with a road map of potential targets, with some arguing that the group likely had a hand behind the scenes to orchestrate the deportation efforts and to silence critics of Israel.
Lawyers for Mahmoud Khalil, a former graduate student at Columbia University who was arrested and held in an immigration facility in Louisiana for more than three months, filed Freedom of Information Act requests seeking details about Canary Mission’s role in his detainment after the group heralded his arrest.
Reached for comment through an anonymous email, the group said it had “no contact with this administration.”
“We document individuals and groups that promote hatred of the U.S.A., Israel and Jews,” the emailed response, signed The Canary Mission Team, said.
Before Mr. Hatch’s testimony on Wednesday, lawyers also called to the witness stand the latest of several faculty members to speak to what they described as the arrests’ chilling effect on campus.
Nadia Abu El-Haj, an anthropology professor at Barnard College and Columbia, recalled seeing her own profile posted on the Canary Mission website while scanning to see who else had been listed after demonstrations flared on the Morningside Heights campus.
Ms. Abu El-Haj said that because she is a U.S. citizen, she felt a level of comfort speaking out in defense of the demonstrations, but that many of the students she worked with through the university’s Center for Palestine Studies began to retreat from public life around the time of the Trump administration’s March crackdown.
Over two days of testimony, she recalled seeing students become subdued after their personal information and photos were listed on the Canary Mission and Betar sites, over what she said was nonviolent protest and squarely political speech.
She mentioned Ranjani Srinivasan, an architecture student and Fulbright recipient who went into hiding after learning that her visa had been canceled. And Ms. Abu El-Haj spoke of her knowledge of Mr. Khalil and Mohsen Mahdawi, organizers of pro-Palestinian demonstrations at Columbia who had been detained for months by the Trump administration. Both have green cards.
She testified that the two men had always denounced antisemitism, and had turned away anyone espousing such views who attempted to join the demonstrations.
During cross-examination, a lawyer from the Justice Department repeatedly asked Ms. Abu El-Haj about her speeches and writings since March defending the campus protests at Columbia, ostensibly to demonstrate for Judge Young that she had never felt intimidated or forced to limit her own speech.
But after each example she stressed the same point, more than half a dozen times.
“Yes,” she said. “But I’m a U.S. citizen.”
Zach Montague is a Times reporter covering the federal courts, including the legal disputes over the Trump administration’s agenda.
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