The Donald Trump administration is using the Canary Mission’s website to target foreign students with deportation. The Canary Mission is an anonymous database that uses McCarthyite tactics against people expressing pro-Palestine views or criticism of Israel.

During a trial challenging Trump’s immigration policy on Wednesday, a federal judge asked, “Many of the names of the student protesters provided to you for the Office of Intelligence to produce reports of analysis on came from the website Canary Mission?”

Peter Hatch, a senior DHS investigations official, responded, “It’s true, many of the names, or even most of the names, came from that website,” but maintained the agency also relied on other sources. The Canary Mission denied direct contact with the Trump administration.

Hatch added that there were no official ties between the Canary Mission and the US government. “I don’t know who creates the website. We don’t have a relationship with the creators of the website,” he said.

The Canary Mission targeted Rümeysa Öztürk – a Turkish graduate student at Tufts University accused of “anti-Israel activism” – before she was arrested by masked police officers on the streets in Somerville, Massachusetts, earlier this year. The Trump administration attempted to expel her from the country over an op-ed she co-authored for a Tufts University student newspaper.

The mission also blacklisted Palestinian activist and former Columbia University grad student Mahmoud Khalil before he was targeted with deportation by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) last March. Months before his arrest, the organization said Khalil “participated in the pro-Hamas encampment at Columbia in April 2024 as a lead negotiator on behalf of Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD), an anti-Israel student coalition.”

The Trump administration is not the first to use the Canary Mission in criminal proceedings. “The case of a Palestinian-American law student named Ahmad Aburas provides a particularly disturbing portrait of Canary Mission tactics in action,” Max Blumenthal wrote in 2018. “While Aburas was enrolled at Seton Hall Law School, Canary Mission contacted school administrators to suggest that statements he made on social media expressed support for terrorism. Seton Hall then called the FBI, Aburas was taken out of class and subjected to interrogation by federal agents over his political views.”