A MARTĂŤNEZ, HOST:
Since President Trump began his second term, the Department of Homeland Security has insisted it's going after, quote, "the worst of the worst." But most of those arrested do not have a criminal record. Much of that intelligence fueling the administration's mass arrests flows through two federal buildings in a quiet suburb of one of the bluest states, Vermont. Now immigration rights advocates there are pushing back. NPR immigration correspondent Vanessa Romo has the story.
VANESSA ROMO, BYLINE: Fall in Vermont is known for one thing, peak leaf-peeping season. It's when thousands of tourists descend upon the state's bucolic mountains to revel in the shimmering glow of orange, red and yellow trees. But that's not what drew Abby Mnookin (ph) to drive 150 miles to the idyllic hamlet of Williston, Vermont.
ABBY MNOOKIN: I guess many Vermonters and maybe others would be surprised to know that a lot of ICE surveillance activity, including social media surveillance, happens here.
ROMO: The sleepy town of 10,000 in this solidly blue state is home to two of ICE's three surveillance infrastructure facilities in the nation. And immigrant rights advocates say these headquarters are the backbone of ICE enforcement nationwide.
LEIF TARANTA: We are in Harvest Lane in Williston. This is the location of the Law Enforcement Support Center, which is the national tip line for ICE and also their data center and surveillance headquarters.
ROMO: Leif Taranta is one of the organizers of the ongoing protests outside the ICE complex. On this cold day, the protest has taken the form of a pop-up community garden, blocking the building's parking lot entrances. Picture giant planter boxes on wheels.
Taranta says that in addition to fielding all of the public's calls to ICE's tipline, which DHS officials say is tens of thousands a year, this is one of the places where targeting specialists are curating lists of noncitizens to prioritize for deportation.
TARANTA: And then the people here coordinate with ICE agents about going to pick up people. And so they do a lot of the dispatching for ICE nationally from here.
ROMO: ICE officials did not respond to NPR's specific questions about these facilities and the work they do and its uses. But the department's literature touts a massive cache of information contained on site - more than 100 million electronic records and troves of biometric data - all of which are at the disposal of federal, state and local law enforcement 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
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ROMO: About a mile and a half away is ICE's National Criminal Analysis Targeting Center. The office is tucked into a small business park between a gym and a cafe. The protest collective has planned a punk show here later this evening. Protester Elliott Hungerford describes this center as the heart of Homeland Security's panoptic system, where human and AI monitors are scraping and synthesizing data all hours of the day.
ELLIOTT HUNGERFORD: To compile these really in-depth portraits of individuals throughout the country.
ROMO: He says everyone, not just noncitizens, should be scared and worried by the vast sources and databases that are being harvested here.
Kabbas Azhar, an attorney at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, says there's been an alarming shift in the last couple of years, especially after the latest windfall from Congress made ICE the highest funded law enforcement agency in the country. He says anyone who expresses anti-ICE sentiment could be fair game for these analysts.
KABBAS AZHAR: There's more proactive collection that is being considered by analysts instead of just kind of querying a database.
ROMO: For example, one contract shows that DHS wants to turbocharge the breadth of social media data mining it's doing - everything from WhatsApp to TikTok to LinkedIn - to find people suspected of posing a threat to ICE or the administration. Azhar says it's called sentiment analysis.
AZHAR: Of course, there's a lot of issues with that. Speech is very ambiguous, very contextual. And oftentimes this threat analysis that they're doing sweeps in a whole host of, like, protected speech as well.
UNIDENTIFIED PROTESTERS: (Singing) He was a skater boy. He said see you later boy.
ROMO: Back at the pop-up garden protest, there's a convivial vibe. People are singing and dancing. But there's no denying it's a small crowd, some 30 people. That's not discouraging to Julie Macuga, who, when asked if this is a David versus Goliath situation, says yes because David won.
JULIE MACUGA: I think the, like, sort of polite politics of a lot of Vermont, they can kind of just get away with it and sort of go unnoticed. And that is no longer the case, and the community wants them out.
ROMO: Macuga hopes more Americans will mobilize to keep ICE surveillance out of their communities in the same way they've stood up to keep ICE detention centers out of their neighborhoods.
Vanessa Romo, NPR News, Williston, Vermont. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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