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.)