ICE Is Determined To Unmask a Reddit User Whose Only Crime Seems To Be Criticizing ICE
After withdrawing a summons in the face of a legal challenge, the government is seeking a grand jury subpoena.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is trying to unmask an anonymous Reddit user whose only crime seems to be criticizing the Trump administration's immigration crackdown. Last month, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which is part of DHS, withdrew an administrative subpoena demanding information about the Reddit account "Tired_Thumb" after facing a legal challenge in the Northern District of California, where Reddit is headquartered. But as The Intercept reported last week, federal prosecutors in Washington, D.C., now seem intent on obtaining information about the ICE critic from Reddit via a grand jury subpoena.
"Government critics are not suspects and free speech is not a crime," says Will Creeley, legal director of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). "The First Amendment protects our right to criticize the government anonymously—an American tradition that dates back to the founding. So far, the government hasn't been able to point to a single Reddit post [by Tired_Thumb] that's not protected by the First Amendment. Not one. By putting the administration's feelings above the First Amendment, government agents are sending a deliberate message to each of us: Don't criticize us—or else."
On March 6, Reddit notified the user associated with Tired_Thumb, identified as "J. Doe" in court documents, that it had received a "legal request" for information about the account, including Doe's name, address, phone number, length of service, and I.P. addresses. Doe, who lives in Oregon, sought help from the Civil Liberties Defense Center (CLDC), which is based in Eugene, in challenging what an ICE agent described as a summons issued under 19 USC 1509, which deals with customs enforcement.
As CLDC attorney Matthew Kellebrew noted in a March 12 motion to quash the summons, that supposed authority is inapplicable in this case. "The statute stops far short of conferring generalized authority to obtain records of any kind beyond the scope of those related to merchandise duties, taxes, or fees," Kellebrew wrote. "Here, there is no plausible nexus between the documents sought and those permissible by statute. J. Doe is a U.S. citizen who has not traveled outside the country, is not engaged in any international commerce, has no business concerns outside the United States, and primarily uses their Reddit account to engage in political speech relevant to their local community."
The ICE agent who signed the summons nevertheless claimed Section 1509 provides general authority to demand records relevant to the enforcement of any "laws and regulations administered by" ICE or Customs and Border Protection (CBP). A November 2017 report from the DHS Office of the Inspector General (OIG) rejected that interpretation of the law, noting that Title 19 "addresses ascertainment, collection, and recovery of customs duties."
The OIG report was prompted by CBP's invocation of Section 1509 to justify a March 2017 summons aimed at unmasking an anonymous Twitter user. CBP withdrew that summons after Twitter challenged it, arguing that it exceeded the agency's legal authority and impinged on the user's First Amendment rights. Following that incident, CBP reminded investigators that "the issuance of a 1509 summons requires probable cause to believe that the records relate to an importation of merchandise that is prohibited." But the OIG found that "lack of clear guidance on the proper use of Section 1509 Summonses has resulted in inconsistent—and, in some cases, improper—use of such summonses."
Evidently that problem persists. But if Doe was not suspected of a customs violation, what exactly was ICE investigating? When Doe's attorneys "reviewed their Reddit posts," The Intercept notes, "they found nothing to suggest criminal activity or intent."
The posts included criticism of Jonathan Ross, the ICE agent who fatally shot Minneapolis protester Renee Good on January 7. According to The Intercept, Doe noted that "Ross had lived in Chaska, Minnesota; grew up in Indiana; and served in the Indiana National Guard—biographical details that were circulating widely at the time." Doe added, "Hopefully he moves up to Stillwater State Penitentiary."
In another post, Doe responded to a Reddit user who sought suggestions of slogans for anti-ICE protest signs. Doe suggested "Urine speaks louder than words"—the title of a song by the folk punk band Wingnut Dishwashers Union. Doe also had remarked that "TSA sucks and we all know it." According to Doe's lawyers, The Intercept says, "these were the most aggressive posts they could find."
ICE, in other words, not only relied on imaginary legal authority for its summons; it seemed intent on investigating someone for constitutionally protected speech. The summons "seeks to unmask an anonymous speaker engaging in political speech on the internet," Kellebrew noted in his motion. "The U.S. Supreme Court has consistently protected the right of individuals and groups to engage in anonymous political speech."
Under the relevant case law, "the government must prove a compelling interest in such identification," Kellebrew wrote. "Because the government has failed to do so, an order compelling the production of identities would grossly infringe on the First Amendment rights of Doe."
A couple of weeks after Kellebrew filed that motion, ICE withdrew the summons. But now the action has moved across the country to Washington, D.C., where Reddit has been summoned to appear before a grand jury. The government has a decided advantage in that forum, since the grand jurors will hear only one side of the case.
Since the beginning of President Donald Trump's second term, The Intercept notes, "federal agents have increasingly demanded [that] social media companies reveal the users behind anonymous accounts critical of his immigration crackdown." Although they are especially interested in posts that "identify employees of the U.S. Border Patrol and ICE or share real-time information on enforcement activity," they "have also targeted social media users seemingly doing nothing more than expressing anger at the government."
In the latter sort of cases, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has found, the government tends to withdraw its demands when they are challenged. "We should be very, very, very concerned that they've now taken one of these to a grand jury," EFF senior counsel David Greene told The Intercept. "It's something to be taken very seriously."
During the first half of 2025, Reddit reports, it received 1,179 requests for account information from law enforcement agencies, "the highest volume of information requests that Reddit has received in a single reporting period." Two-thirds of the requests came from U.S. agencies, and in those cases Reddit supplied the information 82 percent of the time.
"Reddit carefully reviews each request for compliance with applicable laws," the platform says. "If we determine that a request is not legally valid (e.g., missing legal requirements; seeking information outside the scope of the issued legal process), Reddit will challenge or reject it. If we consider the request to be overbroad or unclear, we will ask the requesting entity to modify or refine the request."
Reddit says it "attempts to notify our users when their account data is subject to legal information requests before any disclosures are made" unless "we are legally prohibited from doing so, or under certain other counterproductive circumstances (e.g., exigent emergency situations, child safety matters)." But if users cannot afford an attorney or find one who will work pro bono, they are unlikely to successfully challenge such "requests." In Doe's case, according to Kellebrew's motion, Reddit said it "intended to comply unless Doe provided Reddit with a motion to quash."
It is "categorically FALSE" that the DHS is targeting Doe based on speech protected by the First Amendment, a department spokesperson told Military.com this week. "Our law enforcement officers are on the frontlines arresting terrorists, gang members, murderers, pedophiles and rapists. They are experiencing coordinated campaigns of violence against them." According to the DHS, Military.com says, the effort to identify Doe is "part of an investigation into threats and doxxing of ICE law enforcement officers."
Judging from the posts reviewed by the CLDC, however, nothing Doe said on Reddit would qualify as a "true threat," a First Amendment exception that the Supreme Court defines as a "serious expression" indicating that "a speaker means to 'commit an act of unlawful violence.'" In some cases, "you could argue that something akin to a threat had been posted online," CLDC litigation director Lauren Regan told Military.com. "But when we went through the entire content of our client's Reddit posts, there was nothing. This was very innocuous."
Nor would any of the posts qualify as doxing, in the sense of revealing previously private information about someone with malicious intent. But the DHS has a history of defining such terms broadly enough to encompass constitutionally protected conduct.
"Violence is anything that threatens [ICE agents] and their safety," Kristi Noem, then the DHS secretary, told reporters last July, "so it is doxing them, it's videotaping them where they're at when they're out on operations, encouraging other people to come and to throw things, rocks, bottles."
A couple of months later, Tricia McLaughlin, then the assistant DHS secretary for public affairs, likewise described "videotaping ICE law enforcement and posting photos and videos of them online" as a form of "doxing." She added that "we will prosecute those who illegally harass ICE agents to the fullest extent of the law." In January, McLaughlin told Wired that "videoing our officers in an effort to dox them and reveal their identities" is "a federal crime and a felony."
According to the DHS, it seems, armed government agents have a right to conceal their identities, but critics of those agents have no such right. As FIRE's Creeley notes, that is not how the First Amendment works.
