A newly public court filing alleges that Department of Homeland Security agents collected photographs, license plate numbers and other information about people observing immigration enforcement in Maine, and stored the records in a Palantir-built case management system. A redacted version of the September filing became public on Friday.
The allegations arise from Operation Catch of the Day, an immigration enforcement surge in January. Four observers, Elinor Hilton, Colleen Fagan, Polyxenia Pantos and Carlyn Williams, are pursuing a proposed class action challenging alleged retaliation for observing and recording Immigration and Customs Enforcement activity.
The filing describes an agent creating observer records in Investigative Case Management, or ICM, the system used by ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations unit to document its investigations. It also alleges that photographs were sent to a Customs and Border Protection officer for facial recognition searches through an application called Mobile Query.
The government disputes the plaintiffs’ broader account. Its September motion to dismiss says the encounters were isolated incidents during a four-day operation and that the plaintiffs have not established an ongoing policy of retaliation or a sufficiently immediate threat of future harm to obtain prospective court relief.
Government lawyers say DHS policy prohibits targeting people merely for exercising First Amendment rights, including peacefully recording officers. They argue that identification checks may serve legitimate safety or investigative purposes. The motion says the agent created eight subject records for people he considered potential law-enforcement threats, but did not attempt to nominate anyone to a terrorist watchlist.
ICE’s case-management infrastructure has a longstanding connection to identity systems. A 2025 procurement notice for a replacement ICM system specified integration with federal identity and biometric databases, role-based access controls and case-level separation of data.
The Center for Strategic and International Studies has separately examined security risks from consolidated immigration-enforcement data. Its analysis addressed the aggregation of biometric and personal records and argued for stronger governance of those repositories.
The Maine plaintiffs are asking the court to order Williams’ records archived, prevent DHS from using collected information against them, and prohibit agents in Maine from threatening observers with watchlists or following them home.
Sources: WIRED, U.S. District Court filing
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By the ID Tech Editorial Team
