DHS Demanded Google Surrender Data on Canadian’s Activity, Location Over Anti-ICE Posts

The Department of Homeland Security tried to obtain a Canadian man’s location information, activity logs, and other identifying information from Google after he criticized the Trump administration online following the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by federal immigration agents in Minneapolis early this year.

Lawyers for the man, who has not been named, are alarmed in part because they say that the man has not entered the United States in more than a decade. “I don’t know what the government knows about our client’s residence, but it’s clear that the government isn’t stopping to find out,” says Michael Perloff, a senior staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union of the District of Columbia who is representing the man in a lawsuit against Markwayne Mullin, the secretary of DHS, over the summons. The lawsuit alleges that DHS violated the customs law that gives the agency the power to request records from businesses and other parties.

Perloff argues that the government is using the fact that big tech companies are based in the US to request information it would not otherwise be able to get. “It’s using that geographic fact to get information that otherwise would be totally outside of its jurisdiction,” he says. “I mean, we’re talking about the physical movements of a person who lives in Canada.”

DHS and Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The demand for the man’s location data was included in a request DHS issued to Google called a customs summons, which is supposed to be used to investigate issues related to importing goods and collecting customs duties.

“It says right in the statute, it’s for records and testimony about the correctness of an entry, the liability of a person for duties, taxes, and fees, you know, compliance with basic customs laws,” says Chris Duncan, a former assistant chief counsel for US Customs and Border Protection who now works as a private-practice attorney representing importers and exporters. “And that's all it was ever envisioned to be used for.”

A customs summons is a type of administrative subpoena and is not reviewed by a judge or grand jury before being sent out. According to the complaint, Google alerted the man about the request on February 9, despite an ask included in the summons “not to disclose the existence of this summons for an indefinite period of time.”

Through his attorneys, the man told WIRED he initially mistook the notification for a joke or scam before realizing it was real.

The summons, which is included in the complaint, does not give a specific reason for why the man was under investigation beyond citing the Tariff Act of 1930. The man’s lawyers contend that he did not export or import anything from the United States between September 1, 2025, to February 4, 2026, the time frame the government requested information about.

Instead, the man’s lawyers allege, the summons was filed in response to the man’s online activities, including posts that he made condemning immigration enforcement agents after the killings of Good and Pretti in January.

The man tells WIRED that watching members of the Trump administration “smear these two souls as terrorists was absolutely disgusting and enraging. People were being asked to disbelieve our own eyes so that the men responsible for killing two good Americans would go free.”

The man says of his online activity, “I felt I needed to do something that would stand out and be seen by despairing Americans to show them they had support and that they were not alone.”

The summons specifically asks for any records and other information related to “History of Account Suspensions or Violations of Terms due to Threatening or Harassing Language.” The complaint describes the man’s posts as “passionate and even sometimes off-color but never contain threats or incite violence.”

As the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement efforts have ramped up, DHS has used both customs summons and other types of administrative subpoenas to try to unmask users who are publicly critical of the agency or who attempt to track its agents’ activities. In March, after an anonymous Reddit user sued to stop DHS from obtaining their personal information through a customs summons, federal officials withdrew the administrative subpoena and issued a grand jury subpoena instead.

It’s unclear how many people have been targeted as part of these efforts. In February, The New York Times reported that Google, Reddit, Discord, and Meta had received hundreds of administrative subpoenas during the previous six months. In March, a group of US congressmembers asked tech leaders for data on how many requests their companies have received and how they’ve handled them, but it’s unclear whether they received a response. In April, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital-rights nonprofit, sued DHS and Immigration and Customs Enforcement in an effort to obtain records about how many subpoenas the agencies have sent.

Both tech companies and civil liberties advocates have been concerned about DHS’s use of administrative subpoenas for years. WIRED previously found that agents issued customs summons, including ones for legitimate investigations into customs issues, more than 170,000 times between 2016 and mid-August 2022. The most common recipients of those requests included big tech firms and telecommunications companies.

In 2017, Twitter, which is now X, filed a lawsuit against DHS over what it alleged was an illegal customs summons that demanded information about who was behind an anonymous account that was critical of the first Trump administration’s immigration policies. DHS later withdrew its request, and the social media platform dropped its lawsuit in response, meaning a judge was never able to rule on whether the practice was actually illegal.

That incident triggered an investigation by the DHS Office of the Inspector General, which found that the group within DHS that had issued the request, the US Customs and Border Protection’s Office of Professional Responsibility, violated its own policies in about one out of every five summonses that the OIG reviewed.

“The saddest thing for me about all of this, as a career national security law enforcement attorney, is that if you abuse your authority like this, it undermines all the legitimate stuff you do,” says Duncan.

“There was a long time where the United States government advised other countries on how to protect people within their territory from foreign oppression,” Perloff says. “And it is appalling to realize that now other countries may have to do that about us.”