At the beginning of Donald Trump’s second term, I warned that the president’s mass deportation plan posed a serious threat to American citizens’ rights and safety. Long before Trump, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had a habit of accidentally arresting, detaining, and even deporting US citizens, and there was little doubt that a massively expanded version of this deportation program would end up scooping up far more US citizens by mistake.

That is in fact what has happened over the past few months, with ICE repeatedly capturing and even banishing American citizens from the country, including a four-year-old battling cancer who was thrown out without any medication. But the situation is much graver than this, because far from simply mistakenly sweeping US citizens up in a dragnet, evidence is building that the immigration enforcement system is deliberately targeting US citizens, particularly politically active Americans who are critical of the Trump administration — US citizens like popular left-wing Twitch streamer Hasan Piker.

As first reported by User Mag, the Substack started by former Washington Post reporter Taylor Lorenz, Piker was held and questioned for hours by agents of Customs and Border Protection (CBP) upon returning to the country from France. Hasan later outlined his interrogation in a forty-minute-long video, in which he described being questioned about his work and political beliefs by an Iraqi-American CBP agent he described as “cordial” and friendly, and who said he understood his opposition to US wars.

According to Piker, agents appeared to know who he was, and their questions soon turned to interrogations of his political beliefs, including repeated questioning about his thoughts on Hamas and the Houthis, his views on US foreign policy, and his bans from the streaming platform Twitch, one of which came after he had said that “America deserved 9/11,” a comment he later expressed regret for. Piker told the agent that he had been trying to talk about the concept of “blowback” for US foreign policy, he recounted, and that the agent “agreed with the blowback sentiment in terms of 9/11.”

The questioning became more threatening in the latter half of the interrogation, Piker said, as it moved from a “fact-finding mission” to asking him about “actionable” items, all of which moved more explicitly into impinging on First Amendment–protected activity. According to Piker, the agent asked him if he had ever interviewed members of Hamas or the Houthis, at one point questioning whether a Yemeni man who had appeared on his show was a Houthi.

“The very fact that that was a point of contention that could have gotten me arrested is insane,” Piker said.

The constitutional and civil liberties–related perils of this kind of behavior is not hard to see. A regular part of the process of reporting, particularly in matters of foreign policy, is talking to unsavory individuals and groups, officials, and governments that have an antagonistic relationship with the United States. Much reporting on the Gaza and Yemen wars, whether in the United States, Israel, or other countries, has often been based on information gleaned from sources like these. The mere act of talking to, establishing a relationship with, and getting information from them is not an endorsement of their views or actions.

To see how absurd this idea is, consider the fact that it’s Trump himself and his officials who have not only had extensive contact with both of these terrorist groups, but have now made backroom deals with both, and have even said positive or flattering things about them in public. To treat this as tantamount to criminal activity would potentially open up Trump officials themselves and any others in government who have done the same to one day being harassed at the US border.

Piker’s detention would be alarming enough by itself. But this is just the latest and most high-profile in a spate of recent and seemingly escalating targetings of American citizens by immigration agents.

Last month, Amir Makled, a Lebanese-American lawyer from Detroit representing one of the University of Michigan campus protesters charged with a felony by the state’s Democratic attorney general, was stopped at the Detroit Metro airport and interrogated by a Tactical Terrorism Response Team agent. Makled recalled that the agent made clear he knew who he was and what cases he was working on, and immediately asked to access his phone, which potentially would have violated attorney-client privilege. Over two hours, the agents never explained why they had stopped him or what they were looking for and eventually released him.

Since then, several more US citizens have gotten similar treatment. In what she described as an “extremely scary” experience, one Florida TikToker who posts political content and sells anti-Trump merchandise was similarly held, searched, and questioned for two hours in Miami by agents who would not tell her what they were looking for, and asked to go through her various social media accounts.

It’s not always political activity or ideology that seems to mark citizens for interrogation. In April, two other US citizens — a married couple, one of whom, Bachir Atallah, was a real estate lawyer who voted for Trump — were stopped at the Canada-Vermont border in what his sister, an attorney, called an “abusive” encounter. Agents surrounded their vehicle, reached for their guns, handcuffed the Lebanese-born Attallah, and put him in a cell separate from his wife, all causing his blood pressure to spike, leading him to later say he “feared for his life.” In each case, CBP has disputed these details, calling them false and sensationalized — just as the CBP agent who interrogated Piker told him that the stories of border detentions were “exaggerated,” in his recollection.

It’s not just CBP. A series of recent incidents suggest ICE and the entire Department of Homeland Security (DHS), too, are escalating the targeting of US citizens, now arresting government officials and even threatening them with prosecution on the basis of obstructing their work.

Last week, ICE handcuffed and detained for five hours Newark mayor Ras Baraka and charged him with trespassing for what a DHS official claimed was him “storming” into a detention facility. A DHS official has since threatened to prosecute three members of Congress for the same thing, claiming that the elected officials had assaulted ICE officers — not the first time a DHS official under Trump has made this threat against an elected official of the opposing party.

The week before that, ICE drew outrage across the political spectrum for arresting a circuit court judge officers claimed had obstructed their arrest of an undocumented man. The judge has since been charged, even as right-leaning commentators warn of federal overreach in the case, and even though in a similar case in Trump’s first term, the judge was never arrested. The incident particularly raised eyebrows coming as it did after the president had threatened a judge who had ruled against him on immigration matters.

This is not the first time these agencies have come under fire for overstepping into explicitly political territory. In 2019, the CBP raised eyebrows for releasing a video showing armored, shield-carrying agents carrying out a “large-scale civil unrest readiness exercise” in the middle of a particularly controversial government shutdown. The year before that, it was revealed ICE had been surveilling anti-Trump protests in New York City. In 2020, DHS agents clad in military gear were tasked with responding to Black Lives Matter protests that evolved into anti-Trump events, which saw agents grabbing activists off the street and throwing them into unmarked vans.

Piker was ultimately allowed to leave his interrogation after asking if he was being detained, and said he believes he, as a prominent left-wing critic of Trump, was deliberately targeted to create an “environment of fear.” Basic rights, even for US citizens, are notoriously weaker at the US border, while ICE has in the past few months repeatedly been the tip of the spear for Trump’s efforts to test the boundaries of constitutionality. It’s a legitimate question if the administration is exploiting the immigration enforcement system, its officers’ ideological alignment with Trump, and the legal murkiness involved not to deport dangerous and violent criminals, but to instead intimidate his political opponents and dissidents.