Transparency, or doxxing?
Celeste started People over Papers in January, after connecting with other TikTok creators who were also sharing information about ICE raids in their communities. In the ten months since, it has received over 19 million unique visitors, and has been averaging between 200,000-300,000 users per day.
She came up with the idea of mapping the raids “to inform people of what is happening in their communities” and also “documenting history and gathering information about something that will likely be looked back on as an extremely dark time.”
Her project is among a number of volunteer-led efforts, including the ICEBlock app that was removed from app stores last week and the Stop ICE Raids Alert Network, that map anonymous reports on immigration enforcement agents conducting raids.
The maps play an important role in “offer(ing) protection, solidarity, and survival strategies in hostile territory,” Alissa Richardson, a scholar at the University of Southern California that studies how marginalized communities use social media, told MIT Technology Review this summer. They serve as “modern-day Green Books for immigrant communities. Just as Black travelers once used the Green Book to navigate safely through a landscape of racial terror, these digital tools help Latine families move through spaces marked by surveillance and risk,” she said.
Pressuring technology platforms to remove the maps is just one part of the administration’s strategy to stop efforts to track ICE or identify its masked agents conducting raids. In early September, the Department of Homeland Security subpoenaed Meta for Stop ICE Raids Alert Network’s Instagram account, as well as about a number of other non-profit organizations and rapid response networks; the subpoena has been temporarily blocked pending a court hearing.
At least one person has allegedly lost their job in connection to these apps. Carolyn Feinstein, whose husband ran the ICEBlock app, was terminated from her job with the Department of Justice over the summer, which she says was in retaliation for her husband’s work.
“Trying to blunt these efforts to hold federal officers accountable” has the effect of “chilling speech and activism,” says David Greene, the director of civil liberties at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He says that identifying agents does not count as doxxing, because “the idea that law enforcement would be masked and and therefore unaccountable to the people they are serving is really anathema to American values.”
“Saying the doxing itself is an act of violence would require a different definition of violence than the one we’ve traditionally used in regards to legal issues,” says Peter Simi, a sociology professor at Chapman University who studies threats to public officials.