All posts tagged: department of homeland security

ICE Wants to Know Who Bought a Certain Green Beanie From REI in the Last 2 Years

ICE Wants to Know Who Bought a Certain Green Beanie From REI in the Last 2 Years

Published by skeptic

Did you buy a beanie from REI recently? The Department of Homeland Security might be looking for you. New court filings allege that Homeland Security Investigations agents subpoenaed the outdoor retailer in March, requesting the transaction information for “all persons” in the greater Minneapolis-St. Paul area who had purchased a specific type of dark green beanie from the company since 2024. REI did not respond to questions about whether it had complied with the request and, if so, how many people are affected. The filings are part of a broader lawsuit by the federal government against 39 people who attended an ICE protest at a church whose pastor also worked as an acting ICE field office director. Both protesters and journalists who were attempting to cover the event, including former CNN host Don Lemon, are now defendants. The subpoena to REI was one of 92 sent as part of HSI’s investigation into the defendants, according to the court filings. Other recipients included social media companies, airlines, telecom providers, a car rental company, and a state …

Milo Yiannopoulos Detained by ICE in Louisiana

Milo Yiannopoulos Detained by ICE in Louisiana

Published by skeptic

Milo Yiannopoulos, a British national known for his near-constant reinventions as a vizier within far-right American politics for more than a decade, has been detained by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Louisiana, according to the department’s records. While it’s not clear which detention facility Yiannopoulos is currently being held in, the ICE directory instructs any family or legal representatives to contact the Enforcement and Removal Office in Alexandria, Louisiana, a processing center for the central part of the state, about 200 miles from New Orleans. ICE and the Department of Homeland Security did not immediately comment on the matter or indicate plans to deport Yiannopoulos. TMZ first broke the news of Yiannopoulos’ detention. He has previously lived and worked in the US, allegedly on an O-1 visa, which is for individuals with extraordinary abilities in the arts, sciences, and other areas, including journalism—but he has never been a US citizen. Yiannopoulos got his start in US politics at the right-wing website Breitbart, where he worked from 2014 to 2017. He left the job after …

The County Prosecutors Who Became ICE Informants

The County Prosecutors Who Became ICE Informants

Published by skeptic

This story was produced in partnership with Injustice Watch, a nonprofit newsroom in Chicago focused on the court system. Rolando Perez Samayoa had come to the US in 2023 seeking safety. Fleeing violence in Mexico, he’d first planned to make a life in Alabama but had been told that Illinois would protect immigrants like him. “There’s some kind of law there,” he said. “It’s supposed to be a sanctuary.” He was referring to the state’s 2017 TRUST Act, which was meant to keep local law enforcement out of federal deportation efforts. Samayoa made his way to southern Illinois and found work cleaning a factory. After a DUI arrest in Marion County last October, Samayoa said, he attended his hearings—a fact confirmed by court records. In late January, John Christeson, an assistant state’s attorney in the office prosecuting the case, emailed an agent with Homeland Security Investigations, a division of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, about Samayoa. The message included his date of birth, an upcoming court date, and where he lived: Centralia, Illinois. “Ok, we’ll …

Border Wall Construction Threatens 6,000 Years of History on Private Lands

Border Wall Construction Threatens 6,000 Years of History on Private Lands

Published by skeptic

Outrage has exploded over border infrastructure that recently began tearing up pristine desert landscapes in Big Bend National Park. But there’s a quieter battle taking place on private lands in Texas, where the US border wall is set to cut across some of North America’s richest archaeological sites, digging up ancient indigenous artifacts and fracturing millennia-old rock art in its path. The US Department of Homeland Security and Customs and Border Protection awarded billions of dollars in contracts this year toward the construction of a wall and other barriers in West Texas along a remote 500-plus-mile (800-plus-kilometer) riverfront expanse of the US-Mexico border that includes Big Bend National Park and other idyllic parklands. Bipartisan backlash against border wall construction in the national park was swift, ultimately prompting DHS to scuttle plans for a 30-foot steel bollard wall, instead replacing it with miles of riverside vehicle barriers and 200-plus miles of road construction. Bulldozers began clearing along the Rio Grande corridor near Santa Elena Canyon on August 6. Construction has since been paused in the park …

The Painful Truth of Exactly How ICE’s New Shock Gloves Work

The Painful Truth of Exactly How ICE’s New Shock Gloves Work

Published by skeptic

With the revelation that ICE will spend up to $20 million by March on gloves that can deliver painful electric shocks to subdue an individual, according to a notice published earlier this week by the Department of Homeland Security, it’s worth looking at how this apparel, designated as a non-lethal tool for law enforcement, actually works. These shock gloves go by the unsubtle acronym of GLOVE (Generated Low Output Voltage Emitter), and are manufactured by Compliant Technologies, based in Lexington, Kentucky. The GLOVE, previously used in jails and police departments in the US, looks and functions like a normal pair of patrol gloves until officers press a switch to activate an electrical mode. Classified as a CD3 (Conductive Distraction and De-escalation Device), the gloves don’t work like stun guns or Tasers, which shoot out probes or use high voltages to cause neuromuscular incapacitation that overrides the central nervous system. Instead, the GLOVE works using Neuro-Peripheral Interference (NPI), essentially shocking the skin to bombard the sensory nerves and temporarily short-circuit the brain’s focus. Compliant Technologies did …

CBP Workers Allegedly Used Government Databases to Spy on Exes, Crushes, and Colleagues

CBP Workers Allegedly Used Government Databases to Spy on Exes, Crushes, and Colleagues

Published by skeptic

Internal records obtained by WIRED reveal how, for years, United States Customs and Border Protection employees and contractors were accused of abusing sensitive government databases for reasons that had nothing to do with their jobs. The records contain hundreds of allegations of misuse of law enforcement databases, including federal agents querying data to look up romantic interests, monitor family members, expose various personal information and, in some cases, provide intelligence to suspected smugglers or drug-trafficking organizations. Acquired through Freedom of Information Act requests to CBP’s Office of Professional Responsibility and the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General, the records reveal the breadth of alleged database abuse by CBP employees spanning more than a decade. As immigration and border authorities expand their surveillance through facial recognition, license plate readers, mobile-device searches, and commercially purchased location information generated by ordinary apps, the sheer range of these records, which date from 2009 through 2022, highlights how US residents can be—and have been—targeted by federal government employees with access to highly sensitive data and powerful tools. In …

FEMA’s ‘Shadow Administrator’ Was Paid by a DOGE Member’s Startup for Months

FEMA’s ‘Shadow Administrator’ Was Paid by a DOGE Member’s Startup for Months

Published by skeptic

Voorhies testified that though she was not part of DOGE, she was working alongside the DOGE team at DHS. Part of that work involved analyzing documents that Schutt and the other DOGE FEMA members collected, such as “financial statements” and “organizational charts.” After her time as an SGE ran out in the fall of 2025, though, she spoke to Schutt and Lewandowski about how she could continue working with DHS, she said. The solution, as she explained in her deposition: Voorhies would be brought on as a subcontractor to another subcontractor, owned by Schutt. In her deposition, Voorhies said that in September 2025, she started LV Consulting, a company where she was the only employee. In October, this company began serving as a subcontractor to AnchorCode Technologies, which was owned by Schutt and was itself already serving as a subcontractor to another company, IMGE. IMGE was the “prime” contractor—the company with the direct contract with DHS. As subcontractors, AnchorCode and LV Consulting did not have direct contracts with DHS and do not appear in the …

ICE’s New Detention Center Contracts Declare State Laws ‘Shall Not Apply’

ICE’s New Detention Center Contracts Declare State Laws ‘Shall Not Apply’

Published by skeptic

US Immigration and Customs Enforcement is moving to place its private detention network beyond the reach of state inspectors, publishing draft contract terms that declare state and local laws “shall not apply” to the facilities, according to federal documents reviewed by WIRED. The new terms were published earlier this month, a day after a federal judge ruled that a contract cannot override state law and ordered ICE’s largest Pacific Northwest detention center opened to Washington health officials. The ruling, by US District Judge Benjamin Settle, came only after three years of litigation; 10 refused inspections, according to the state; and 3,500 detainee complaints. A Ninth Circuit judge temporarily paused the order on July 21, with a decision on a longer stay expected in early August. Settle ordered the operator of Tacoma’s immigration detention center to admit Washington state health inspectors, ruling that nothing in the company’s federal contract barred them and that no contract could override state law in any case. The next morning, on July 10, ICE published draft contract terms for 5,500 detention …

DHS Official Resigns, Citing ‘War on Immigrants’

DHS Official Resigns, Citing ‘War on Immigrants’

Published by skeptic

The Department of Homeland Security’s top numbers-cruncher has resigned, citing the Trump administration’s “war on immigrants” on his way out. DHS has been a hub of controversy during the second Trump term: the ICE raids in American cities, the wild spending, the growing archipelago of detention centers, the attempts to hide data about it all. But vanishingly few officials have left the department and been openly critical of the direction it has taken. Marc Rosenblum, who served as executive director of the Office of Homeland Security Statistics and a deputy assistant secretary at the department, is one of the first. “I’m thrilled to end my relationship with the current administration,” Rosenblum said in a LinkedIn post over the weekend. “Between the war on immigrants, the war on feds, and the war on facts (not to mention the crazy war in Iran and the brazen corruption), I just need a change.” Rosenblum also served in the first Trump and Biden administrations, initially running DHS’s office of immigration statistics, and then overseeing stats for the entire department—collating …

Your Period Tracker Is (Probably) Spying on You

Your Period Tracker Is (Probably) Spying on You

Published by skeptic

Hours of San Francisco Police Department drone video footage exposed on the open web illustrates a new era of incredibly granular—and consequential—urban surveillance. Meanwhile, the San Francisco City Attorney’s Office sent cease-and-desist letters to Apple and Google this week demanding that the tech giants delete 13 AI nudifying “face-swap” apps from their app stores that are almost exclusively used to target women and girls. Since WIRED first reported in June about Meta’s NameTag face-recognition system, company executives have made opaque and conflicting comments about whether the feature even exists. We took a step back to lay out both the claims and the facts about the very real system. In a speech on Thursday, President Donald Trump continued to push unsubstantiated and thoroughly debunked claims about interference in the 2020 US election. He even promised massive revelations in a trove of documents posted to the White House website, but the files did not prove his assertions—and in some cases actually contradicted Trump’s claims. As adoption of AI tools rapidly expands and their capabilities increase, the tech …