NPR reports that the DOJ withheld dozens of pages of FBI interviews and that various documents mentioning Trump, at certain times, were briefly removed or hidden.
The Trump administration is considering requiring banks to track clients’ citizenship status in order to find more people to deport. The Wall Street Journal reports that the White House is looking at signing an executive order or some other means to compel financial institutions to gather the data. Banks would likely have to ask for identifying documents, such as passports, from both new and existing customers who want a bank account in the U.S. Banks are reportedly alarmed at such an executive order, according to the Journal. They already have legal requirements to collect certain information for law enforcement to fight against financial crimes, including money laundering. But those requirements don’t specifically include gathering citizenship information, and there’s no law against noncitizens opening bank accounts in the U.S. A White House official told the publication that the new requirement hasn’t been approved and is only being discussed within the Treasury. A division of the Treasury Department that enforces laws against money laundering and counterterrorism financing could be used to collect the information, an unnamed source told the Journal. Last year, the Department of Homeland Security forced the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to turn over the personal information of immigrants enrolled in Medicaid, and the U.S. Postal Service has also been enlisted to identify targets. The goal seems to be not only increasing the number of deportations but also to force all immigrants, even those with legal status, to the fringes of American society by making them afraid that basic services, government or otherwise, can be used against them.
[This article is part of a Labor Notes roundtable series: How Can Unions Defend Worker Power Against Trump 2.0? We will be publishing more contributions here and in our magazine in the months ahead. Click here to read the rest of the series.—Editors]
Already, financial institutions are pushing back at the proposed move.
The Department of Homeland Security is threatening to put legal observers monitoring ICE activity on a domestic terrorist watchlist, according to a new lawsuit. Politico, citing the lawsuit, reports that DHS agents used facial recognition technology and license plate readers to monitor observers in Maine who were keeping tabs on federal immigration agents. The federal law enforcement officers would then threaten protesters. The lawsuit against the department and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was filed Monday by two of those observers, Colleen Fagan and Elinor Hilton, who are hoping for an injunction that would stop the department from using the technology to threaten legal observers.Hilton and Fagan allege that agents scanned their faces and license plates in two separate instances last month while they were recording ICE in Portland. In one occurrence, the lawsuit states that an agent told Hilton, “I hope you know that if you keep coming to things like this, you are going to be on a domestic terrorist watchlist. Then we’re going to come to your house later tonight.”The lawsuit cited other Maine incidents documented in news articles, such as one ICE agent driving to a legal observer’s home and repeatedly honking their horn. Another time, a federal agent drove to the home of a protester and told her, “This is a warning. We know you live right here.”The federal government is resorting to Orwellian means not just to identify people for deportation, but also to surveil protesters and legal observers who oppose the Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda. Companies specializing in surveillance, such as Flock, are being used to gather data, and the recent purchase of TikTok by Trump-friendly owner Skydance has ensured that the social video platform’s data is now in government hands too. ICE is currently using an app developed by Palantir that provides agents with a digital map containing potential deportation targets. That company also happens to be creating a master database in order to collect data on every single American. It seems the Trump administration is not above creating a police state to accomplish its goals.
Files featuring Trump's name have been removed from or kept out of the database from the very beginning, NPR reports.