“Most” of the names of student protesters Immigration and Customs Enforcement was asked to investigate earlier this year were plucked from a pro-Israel website that aims to blacklist pro-Palestinian students and academics, an agency official told a federal court Wednesday.
The testimony from Peter Hatch, a senior official in ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations, came during the third day in a trial in Boston over the Trump administration’s so-called ideological deportation policy, which a group of university professors say has chilled their protected political speech.
Hatch said during questioning from a lawyer for the professors that in early March he was given a list of names of students for his agency to investigate and that “most” of those names came from the website Canary Mission, but also from other places.
The list was produced by a Department of Homeland Security team created in March to gather reports on people involved in student protests to submit to the State Department.
“Because of the workload,” Hatch said, analysts were moved from working on counterterrorism, global trade, and cybercrimes to join the group, known as the “Tiger Team,” focused on writing reports about people involved in student protests.
His comments are the first time an administration official has said in open court that the government relied on the website this year as it has targeted student protesters, including by moving to deport some alleged outspoken supporters of Palestinians.
The anonymously run Canary Mission website says it “documents individuals and organizations that promote hatred of the USA, Israel and Jews on North American campuses and beyond.” It also says it will profile people who support efforts to boycott, divest from or sanction Israel or companies associating with Israel – which were among the demands of some campus pro-Palestinian protests last school year.
CNN reported earlier this year that a separate but similar website said it shared with the government a list of noncitizen protesters and activists it believes should be deported, but the Department of Homeland Security denied at the time that it was working with either group.
Hatch said in a deposition last month that among the entities providing names to his agency is the office of border czar Tom Homan but that he wasn’t sure which of those entities specifically pulled their names from Canary Mission. During the deposition, he testified that “more than 75%” of the names of student protesters his agency was asked to probe came from the website.
The list from the Canary Mission website, Hatch said Wednesday, contained over 5,000 people that analysts from his Office of Intelligence and Analysis had to review.
“The Canary Mission wasn’t the only group of students. It was most of it, yes,” Hatch said, noting that some were duplicated in multiple sources. “But Canary Mission was the most inclusive.”
Analysts would take the names from the Canary Mission and other sources and proceed to gather facts around the individual, including any information they deemed pertinent – like statements over Israel, support of terrorist leaders and so on, he said. If there was enough information about the person to warrant a report, the analysts would then write one up for the State Department.
The third-party website, Hatch said, wasn’t used as an authoritative source and his analysts didn’t take information on the website at face value but instead conducted their own investigations on people on its list.
The trial unfolding in a federal courthouse in Boston is intended to help a judge determine whether an actual ideological deportation policy exists. If one does, the judge must decide whether such a policy is unlawful.
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