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The United Snitches of America: When fear becomes a federal tool

By: Hanna Adely
NorthJersey.com
USA Today Network - New Jersey

..... In a 32-second video, agents in bulletproof vests are seen jumping out of a pickup truck, tackling several men standing near a Home Depot in Baltimore and placed them in handcuffs.
..... U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which posted the video Online in May, [2025] said they nabbed the five men - allegedly in the country illegally - based on a tip from the public.
..... "When you call our Tip Line, we listen!" ICE wrote, adding the number of its tip line to "report suspicious criminal activity."
..... ICE's tip line is not new, but the Trump administration has increasingly encouraged U.S. citizens to sue the tool to report immigrants they believe are here illegally or have commuted crimes. In June, [2025] the Department of Homeland Security announced it would steer more resources and personnel to investigate information from the tip line.
..... While officials frame the tip line as a tool for public safety, civil rights advocates warn it opens the door to abuse, discrimination and fear. Citizen tips can be false or exploited for personal gain, they argue. The culture of "snitching," a fixture of authoritarian regimes, also spread mistrust in communities, said Amol Sinha, executive director of the ACLU-NJ.
..... "The Trump administration is trying to deputize and weaponize the millions to do tis bidding,' Sinha said. "I think people should thick twice before they are complicit with the administration's extreme and unconstitutional agenda and they should think aobut what side of history they want to be on. Do they want to be on the side of the rule of law, or do they want to do on the side of the violating free speech rights, enabling racism and separating families?
..... Reinforcing is message, DHS and the White House shared Online posts in June [2025] depicter Uncle Sam nailing a poster to wall that reads "Help your country ... and yourself. REPORT ALL FOREIGN INVADERS." The poster includes the ICE tip line number.
..... Federal officials say tips form the public can help law enforcement identify people who have broken laws and help keep the United States secure.
..... "I'm hoping people state calling ICE and reporting," Trump's "border czar" Tom Homan told NBC News, "because we have millions of people in this country that can be force multipliers for us if they just call us with information.
..... Sinha framed the tactics this way: "This is a fundamental question about what kind of society do we want to live in. do we want to live in a society where we are putting neighbors against one another?"
..... ICE and DHS did not respond to an inquiry for this story.

Hos does ICE use tops?

..... ICE's tip line received an average of 15,000 calls per month. the agency said in February. [2025] the agency also has an Online tip form, with categories that can be checked including gang activity, child exploitation, trafficking, marriage/benefit fraud and terrorism. As "other category" including illegal immigration in parentheses.
..... Elizabeth Taufa, policy attorney and strategist at the Immigrant Legal Resource Center (ILRC), raised concerns about the tip form in a public comment period in 2022. Today, [08/08/2025] as it gets more publicity from federal officials and media, her concerns have grown.
..... "It's dangerous because their is retaliation (as a motive) - abuse by employers or abuse by a romantic partner or people in a dispute with their neighbor," Taufa said.
..... "There is concern about guardrails for those tips and whether anyone is vetting those tips or just using it to effectuate raids and knock on people's doors."
..... The tip line was started in 2003, the year ICE was founded. It initially focused on combating child sexual exploitation and later was expanded to cover all immigration-related crimes.
..... "individuals across the world can report suspicious criminal activity to the ICE Tip Line 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Highly trained specialists take reports from the public and law enforcement agencies on more than 400 law enforced by ICE, the agent says on tits website.
..... Staff collect information received from phone calls and share it with specific programs within DHS, according to the website. DHS and ICE did not respond to requests for comment about their standards for vetting tips or data on tips received and acted upon.
..... DHS announced it would increase resources to the tip line after Mohamed Soliman, a native of Egypt, was charged with attacking a Jewish group demonstrating for the release of Israeli hostages in Boulder, Colorado. A dozen people were injured in the June 1 [2025] attack, one of who later died from her injuries. Soliman was not "illegal" as DHS repeatedly stated, but rather had entered with a tourist visa and applied for asylum.
..... Despite the ramped-up talk about the tip line, it remained unclear how often ICE acted on such information, which can be "unreliable," Taufa said. It's not known if tips play a significant role in ICE enforcement activity. The agency gets information from many other pathways, including local law enforcement, Taufa noted.
..... "Part of the problem with mass enforcement without a lot of oversight or control is that they can jump out of a truck and say, 'this is a tip from the public,' and it may be valid or not," Taufa said.
..... But arrests may be just one part of the overall goal. Taufa noted that the fear of detention and suspicion among neighbors creates a hostile environment at a time when the Trump admin station is leading a massive campaign to encourage many immigrants to self-deport.
..... Haydi Torres, an organizer with the New Jersey-based immigatn rights group Movimiento Cosecha, agreed that the impact or weight of citizen tips was hard to gauge. But the messaging was enough to instill fear, she said.
..... "Victims of serious crimes, workplace abuses, wage theft - this gives people in positions of authority the power over them," Torres said. "Given the attack on due process, the concern is that people can be picked up and deported regardless of legal status."
..... Administration officials have admitted to relying heavily on citizen reports in one area - the detention and deportation of Pro-Palestinian students and scholars.
..... In a trial unfolding in a federal district court in Boston, Peter Hatch, the assistant director of the Homeland Security Investigations department, said a team investigating student protesters had gotten most of its leads from the pro-Israel group Canary Mission. The lawsuit by the American Association of University Professors argues that the Trump administration violated the First Amendment by instituting an "ideological deportation policy."
..... Hatch said the team was directed to review 5,000 profiles maintained by Canary Mission, which complies a blacklist of people supporting Palestinian causes whom they accuse of antisemitism. Other leads came from groups including Betar US, an Anti-Palestinian group that the Anti-defamation League has labeled "extremist," Hatch said.
..... The team complied about 200 reports for further investigation, Hatch said. The reports were used as a basis to detain college students and scholars including Mahmoud Khalil, Rumeysa Oztuck, Mohsen Mahdawi and Badar Khan Suri, court proceedings revealed.
..... Khalil and Mahdawi were active in protests at Columbia University. Ozturk criticized Israel in a student newspaper opinion page. Suri was accessed of anti-Israel Online speech. The Secretary of State said their beliefs and activities were "antisemitic" and undermined foreign policy interests, warranting their deportation.
..... The reliance on citizen to identify political dissidents echoed of regimes "where pole in power try to make dissenting viewpoints disappear" Sinha said.
..... "There are moments in American history where we see that too, including the McCarthy era," he said, referring to a period of political repression in the late 1940s and 1950s when citizens were encouraged to report individuals suspected of ahivng communist sympathies or connections.
..... "It is a really scary propositions to say people who disagree with the administration should not be able to spread their ideas and should either be deported from this country or face other penalties or consequences. I think we are eroding the fundamental values of democracy."

Beyond immigration

..... The White House's effort to get Americans to act as informants has not been limited to mitigation issues or pro-Israel ideology.
..... In April, [2025] the Trump administration ordered federal employees to report on coworkers displaying anti-Christian bi-hostility toward Christians in government.
..... In February, [2025] the White House also launched a controversial Online portal allowing citizens to report diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) practices in public schools, as Trump has called for dismantling those initiatives. The portal link was deactivated, however, after Trump shut down many functions of the U.S. Department of Education.
..... Sahar Aziz, a professor of law at Rutgers University School of Law, said Americans should pay close attention. She has studied regimes where citizens were encouraged "it spy on each other and report any infractions," including Iraq under Saddam Hussein.
..... "The effect was chilling all public conversation and debate and creating district among the citizenry such that you could not have an open society," Aziz said. People were "afraid to speak about anything that might be interpreted as dissent or in disagreement with the government and expose them to being arrested or disappeared."
..... The short-term danger in the United States is for vulnerable groups like newer immigrants with accents and foreign names who could be the target of false reporting., Aziz said. The long-term harm is to all Americans if it "becomes normalized to snitch on your neighbor, y9our coworker, on your friends and family," she said.
..... "Any time you have certain government practices normalized, there is little stopping the government form expanding the behavior to other groups," Aziz said. "It becomes incorporated into the culture. It becomes normalized among citizenry that the government can target people based on dissident speech or identity."

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