Attorney General Pam Bondi announced Tuesday that the U.S. Justice Department had succeeded in getting Facebook to remove a group on the platform that allowed people in Chicago to alert their neighbors when ICE was in the area.
“Today following outreach from @thejusticedept Facebook removed a large group page that was being used to dox and target @ICEgov agents in Chicago,” Bondi wrote on X.
“The wave of violence against ICE has been driven by online apps and social media campaigns designed to put ICE officers at risk just for doing their jobs,” Bondi continued. “The Department of Justice will continue engaging tech companies to eliminate platforms where radicals can incite imminent violence against federal law enforcement.”
Right-wing influencer Laura Loomer tweeted about a Facebook group called “ICE Sighting-Chicagoland” on October 8, which appears to be the group that was removed. Loomer claimed on Monday that she had been informed by a source at the Department of Justice that the agency had contacted Facebook’s parent company, Meta, about the page.
“DOJ source tells me they have seen my report and they have contacted Facebook and their executives at META to tell them they need to remove these ICE tracking pages from the platform,” Loomer tweeted. “We will see if they comply. There are DOZENS of pages like the one below that endanger the lives of @ICEgov agents.”
In an emailed statement to Gizmodo, Meta didn’t confirm the name but said a group “was removed for violating our policies against coordinated harm.” Meta didn’t respond to follow-up questions about what kind of specific activity was taking place that violated the policy. But the policy does note that it’s against the Facebook rules to out the undercover status of “law enforcement, military, or security personnel if the content contains the agent’s name, their face or badge.”
It’s completely legal to share information about where police are operating. In fact, the idea that sharing such information should be illegal is only common in authoritarian countries. But Bondi and the Department of Justice have declared war on anyone sharing such basic information, characterizing it as dangerous or violent. And it is against Facebook’s policies for anyone to share information about the secret police that are currently roaming American streets, abducting people. It’s not clear, however, that “doxxing” is what led to the group being removed. That’s just the suggestion from the tech giant.
ICE agents in the U.S. have been criticized for their lack of identification and their frequent use of masks while kidnapping people off the streets. Free countries typically don’t have masked agents of the state refuse to identify themselves, and experts have warned that the practice is just one more step in America’s descent into fascism. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, it should be noted, has become quite chummy with President Trump over the past year.
ICE is currently engaging in a campaign of terror against residents of Chicagoland, and the stories that have been emerging are sometimes hard to believe. For example, the Chicago Tribune reported on Monday that a 44-year-old woman getting off a double shift at a bar downtown earlier this month was suddenly grabbed by three federal agents who zip-tied her hands. They questioned her for an hour, simply because she looked Latina, and didn’t believe her passport was real.
From the Chicago Tribune:
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