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DHS Agents Reportedly Threatened Legal Observers With 'Domestic Terrorist' Database While Using Purportedly AI-Enabled Surveillance During ICE Operations

January 21, 2026

Two plaintiffs have accused DHS personnel of employing supposedly AI-enhanced surveillance during ICE operations, threatening to include them in a 'domestic terrorist' database or watchlist. The complaint includes footage seemingly showing an agent mentioning a 'database', and another alleged warning about nighttime home visits.
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Matched TAIM controls

Suggested mapping from embedding similarity (not a formal assessment). Browse all TAIM controls

Alleged deployer
united-states-department-of-homeland-security, unknown-surveillance-technology-developers
Alleged developer
unknown-surveillance-technology-developers
Alleged harmed parties
elinor-hilton, colleen-fagan, general-public, general-public-of-the-united-states, legal-observers, democracy

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/1390

Data source

Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).

When citing the database as a whole, please use:

McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.

Pre-print on arXiv · Database snapshots & citation guide

We use weekly snapshots of the AIID for stable reference. For the official suggested citation of a specific incident, use the “Cite this incident” link on each incident page.