ICE’s Secret Programs to Spy on All of Us Exposed

The brutality Americans are witnessing from Immigration and Customs Enforcement is just the tip of the iceberg: The agency is reportedly running nearly two dozen secret operations to spy on all of us.

Independent journalist Ken Klippenstein reported Wednesday that he’d received a “sensitive” 15-page government document outlining 21 “major” ICE operations leaked by a concerned Border Patrol official. These operations, many of which had previously gone unreported, have resulted in 6,852 apprehensions since June, according to the document.

One document outlined a program called Operation Abracadabra, which is the process of interviewing 100 percent of detainees in order to identify follow-on targets, such as stash houses, in order to “target transnational criminal corporations.”

A leaked slide explained Operation Abracadabra’s purpose as “tying every individual who crosses the border illegally to a Foreign Terrorist Organization, a Transnational Criminal Organization, and/or utilizing the intelligence to develop targets.”

Another program was Operation Benchwarmer, a plan to use plainclothes agents “embedded in transport vans, sally ports, processing areas, and detention cells” to secretly spy on immigrants who have been detained. That operation already includes 2,000 “intelligence assets” across the country.

Another “secret” program Klippenstein mentioned was Operation Tidal Wave, a state-wide operation in Florida that led to the arrests of 1,120 people, only 63 percent of whom had a criminal record. Another, Operation Fleur De Lis, could potentially refer to an operation in Louisiana where the Department of Homeland Security deployed CBP agents in November. The goal of another operation, called “Dust Off,” was less clear.

President Trump once again appeared to doze off on camera during a milk legislation signing ceremony on Wednesday afternoon.

The president’s eyes were completely shut at multiple points of the ceremony. He can be seen looking drowsily on as Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins drones on about milk, while flanked by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and former Housing Secretary Ben Carson.

This would mark at least the third time since December that Trump has seemed to doze off during a televised event, although it may have been his first on-camera nap of the new year.

After he woke up, Trump signed legislation allowing public schools to serve whole and 2 percent milk, reversing an Obama-era policy that limited schools to fat-free or low-fat options.

He then went on to clarify how to spell “whole milk.” “It’s actually a legal definition—‘whole milk.’ And it’s whole with a w, for those of you that have a problem.”

Need any more proof that CBS News is being transformed into a mouthpiece for Donald Trump’s administration? Look no further than its latest “story” about Jonathan Ross, the ICE agent who shot and killed Renee Good, an American citizen and mother of three.

CBS News posted on X Wednesday morning that Ross had “suffered internal bleeding to the torso” after shooting Good in her vehicle, citing “two U.S. officials briefed on his medical condition.”

The post, which supported the Trump administration’s dubious claims that Ross fired “defensive shots” because his life was in danger, was not accompanied by a link to an actual story.

This claim boosted by CBS News did, however, directly contradict video analysis that suggested Ross was not in the path of the vehicle when he fired the three shots. Rather, Ross braced his hand on the hood of Good’s vehicle while it moved forward and shot her three times as she turned her car away from him and other ICE agents. In additional footage from after the incident, Ross walked up and down the street, appearing unharmed.

Readers were furious that CBS News had boosted the government’s claim without appearing to have done any further reporting.

“No reporting. No story attached. No evidence. Just straightforward state propaganda,” wrote one user on X.

MeidasTouch’s Ron Filipkowski suggested that the story didn’t pass the smell check. “Who are the ‘two US officials’ and why would CBS give them anonymity when they are just putting something out there that DHS and ICE obviously wants put out,” he wrote on X. “Who are these ‘US officials’ and why are they granted anonymity???”

Another user pointed out that Ross would likely have been protected from injury by his Kevlar vest, while another claimed the vehicle would have only been moving four miles per hour maximum, which was not enough to cause internal bleeding. Other users demanded to see Ross’s medical report in order to verify the government’s claim.

Two hours later, CBS News finally posted an actual story, which repeated the same scant information and used the same anonymous sources.

“It was unclear how extensive the bleeding was. The Department of Homeland Security confirmed Ross’s injury, but has not yet responded to CBS News’ requests for more information,” the article read.

The Department of Homeland Security attempted to discredit a journalist Wednesday and was quickly embarrassed.

On Tuesday, Slate published a bombshell article by Laura Jedeed outlining how she had somehow slipped through ICE’s screening process to be offered a job by the agency despite failing to complete any of the required paperwork, including a background check. The next day, DHS tried to claim Jedeed’s article was “such a lazy lie.”

“This individual was NEVER offered a job at ICE,” the agency posted on X. “Applicants may receive a Tentative Selection Letter following their initial application and interview that is not a job offer. It just means they are invited to submit information for review, similar to any other applicant.”

Minutes later, Jedeed, who has contributed to The New Republic in the past, was ready with receipts.

“You sure about that?” Jedeed posted in a quote of DHS’s post, including video of the ICE Recruitment and Hiring Portal, which she could only access if she had been offered a position at the agency.

Jedeed wrote that she never expected to receive an actual job offer when she began her story, as she’s a journalist who writes for left-leaning publications and believed ICE would catch on soon enough. ICE’s recruitment strategies were already considered questionable prior to Jedeed’s article, but now their screening practices can be described as practically nonexistent. Disturbingly, Jedeed has exposed why so many ICE agents seem to be comfortable with flouting the law and engaging in wanton violence: They’ll take anybody.

ICE agents are reportedly asking Minnesota residents to tell them where their Asian neighbors live, as Vice President JD Vance’s promise of “door to door” ICE raids is being realized. And somehow, people on the right are still mad when ICE gets compared to Nazi storm troopers.

Elizabeth Lugert-Thom, a resident of St. Paul, warned in a Facebook post last week that two federal officers had asked her to identify the Hmong and Asian households in her North End neighborhood, according to The Chicago Tribune.

Lugert-Thom said that the officers who’d knocked on her door were not displaying their badges clearly, and did not identify themselves before they began questioning her about a picture of someone they were searching for.

“They said, ‘This is for your safety. We need to find this person,’” Lugert-Thom recalled to the Tribune in a story published Monday.

Lugert-Thom told the ICE agents she didn’t “know anything about that.” In response, she said they asked, “Well, what about the Asian families?”

Lugert-Thom said she was evasive with her answers and did not direct the officers to any of her neighbors. In her Facebook post, she wrote that she’d been “asked to identify Hmong/Asian households in my neighborhood.”

She told the Tribune she’d posted about the interaction on Facebook because “I was a bit shaken and a bit shocked of what I was asked to do.”

It’s hard not to see the similarities between ICE’s door-to-door campaign in Minnesota and the actions of officers during another totalitarian dictatorship that sought to weed out members of ethnic groups their leader blamed for all the nation’s ills.

So far, at least 100 people have been detained by ICE and sent to Texas for deportation processing, The New York Times reported Tuesday. Most of them have been Somali immigrants, but others have hailed from Myanmar and Eritrea. Immigration forces have continued to arrest refugees who entered the country legally and were in the midst of legally obtaining citizenship before the Trump administration suspended all green card processing.

The number of Asian immigrants arrested by ICE surged between February and July 2025, tripling from 1,054 arrests during the same period of the Biden administration to 3,705 arrests, according to one study. The number of noncriminal detainees outnumbered those with criminal convictions by two to one.