An anonymous Reddit user posted criticism of ICE. They commented on a Minneapolis shooting. They suggested a protest sign slogan, the title of a folk punk song. They noted that TSA sucks. Their lawyers reviewed every post they had ever made and found nothing that constituted a crime, a threat, or doxxing in any legally recognized sense.

ICE issued a subpoena demanding their identity anyway.

The subpoena cited a customs enforcement statute that has nothing to do with social media or political speech. The DHS's own Inspector General had previously rejected that exact interpretation of the law after CBP used the same statute to unmask an anonymous Twitter critic in 2017. A federal judge was presented with the motion to quash. ICE withdrew the subpoena rather than defend it in open court. And then federal prosecutors in Washington D.C. took the case to a grand jury, where only one side of the argument will be heard.

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression put it plainly: government critics are not suspects and free speech is not a crime. The First Amendment protects the right to criticize the government anonymously, a tradition that dates to the founding of this republic. The Supreme Court has consistently protected anonymous political speech and established that the government must prove a compelling interest before compelling identification of an anonymous speaker. ICE has not identified a single post by this user that falls outside First Amendment protection. Not one.

What makes this case more alarming than a single overreach is the pattern it represents. Since the beginning of Trump's second term, federal agents have increasingly demanded that social media platforms reveal the identities of anonymous accounts critical of immigration enforcement. Reddit alone received 1,179 law enforcement requests for account information in the first half of 2025, its highest ever, and complied with American requests 82 percent of the time. Most users facing such demands cannot afford an attorney. Most will never know the demand was made until it is too late.

And DHS is expanding the legal theory to justify these demands. Former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem defined doxxing to include videotaping ICE agents during operations. A former DHS spokesperson described filming ICE officers in public and posting the footage online as a federal felony. Under this framework, armed government agents operating in public have a right to conceal their identities while the citizens watching them do not. That is not how the First Amendment works. It has never been how the First Amendment works.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has warned that moving this case to a grand jury is something to be taken very seriously. Congress must take it seriously too. The government should not be permitted to use the secrecy of grand jury proceedings to accomplish what it could not defend in open court. It should not be permitted to redefine constitutionally protected criticism as doxxing. And it should not be permitted to send a message to every American that criticizing immigration enforcement will result in the government finding out who you are.

Sign this petition to demand Congress investigate and restrict the use of grand jury subpoenas to unmask anonymous government critics, pass legislation explicitly protecting the First Amendment right to record and criticize federal law enforcement officers in public, and reject DHS's unconstitutional redefinition of doxxing to encompass constitutionally protected political speech and newsgathering.