A federal agent watched a woman photograph an arrest from several car lengths away, ran her spouse's license plate, pulled their home address from a law enforcement database, entered them both into a federal surveillance system, and then called to warn her that people who do things like that might end up on a domestic terrorism watchlist. This is not a dystopian novel. This happened in Portland, Maine, in January, and there is now a partially unsealed court filing that lays it out in extraordinary detail.
What ICE Was Actually Doing During 'Operation Catch of the Day'
The filing, which Wired reports was made public Friday after being submitted under seal in September, centers on an immigration enforcement surge in Maine called "Operation Catch of the Day." Four people who were legally observing ICE arrests are now plaintiffs in a proposed class action in federal court in Maine: Elinor Hilton, Colleen Fagan, Polyxenia Pantos, and Carlyn Williams.
The filing is built largely on documents produced by the government itself, plus depositions from DHS agents. It alleges that agents ran a systematic program of photographing observers, running their plates, pulling their personal information from law enforcement databases, and entering records on them into a federal case management system. Not people they arrested. Not people they suspected of crimes. People who showed up to watch.
The central figure in the filing is identified only as "Agent J.C." According to the legal documents, he created records on at least six observers in the Investigative Case Management database, or ICM. The government, in its own filings, puts that number at eight. He labeled two people he filmed in a Home Depot parking lot as "Threat to Law Enforcement, Professional Protestor" and sent their photos to a CBP officer to run through a facial recognition app called Mobile Query.
The Phone Call That Makes This Undeniable
On January 20, Pantos stood near their spouse's car and briefly watched and photographed an arrest. That's it. That is the full extent of what triggered what came next.
Wired reports that hours after that, Agent J.C. ran the plate on the car, pulled a report on its owner from Accurint, a LexisNexis law enforcement database, which handed him Williams' home address, phone numbers, and the names of people she lives with. He circulated her photo to colleagues asking if she was the woman at the scene. Then he called her cell phone that afternoon.
He identified himself only as "the Department of Homeland Security." According to Williams, he told her she should encourage Pantos not to do anything like that again, because people who do things like that might get added to a domestic terrorism watchlist. In his deposition, J.C. claims he told her she would be arrested if she continued. Government attorneys say he denied mentioning a terrorism watchlist. One of those accounts is false. Either way, a federal agent called a private citizen at home to tell her to stop watching his colleagues work in public.
The Palantir Database That Was Never Supposed to Exist
ICM, the system where all of this ended up, is not some rogue spreadsheet J.C. cooked up himself. ICE awarded Palantir the contract to build it in 2014, on top of the company's Gotham software platform. According to Wired, in 2022 ICE handed Palantir a new five-year support contract worth up to roughly $96 million. In 2025, the agency added nearly $30 million more to that contract to develop something called "ImmigrationOS."
Here is where it gets worse. According to a 2016 DHS privacy assessment that the filing references, ICM automatically shares the subject records that agents create with CBP's TECS system, where they function as "lookout records" for border screening. Williams' ICM record, per documents the government itself produced, describes her as the registered owner of a vehicle used to "interrupt ICE arrests" and says her driver's license photo matched a video of an "aggressive woman" who "interjected herself into an arrest." That record, under the system's own rules, now flags her for secondary inspection at the border. According to the filing, that flag runs until at least January 2027.
Palantir did not respond to requests for comment from Wired. The company has been collecting federal contracts at a pace that would make a defense lobbyist blush, and it has nothing to say about its software being used to build dossiers on women who stand near parked cars during immigration arrests.
The Government's Defense Is Not Reassuring
ICE's former acting director Todd Lyons wrote to Rep. Maxwell Frost in April to insist that ICE "does not maintain any kind of database of U.S. citizens protesting ICE activities." He also said DHS isn't keeping a "separate, standalone database" of people it hasn't arrested or detained.
That framing is doing a lot of heavy lifting. The argument appears to be that because the ICM database was originally built for case management, and because the records on observers were added into that existing system rather than a new one built specifically for protesters, it doesn't count as a protest database. This is the kind of logic that should embarrass the attorney who signed off on it.
DHS called the lawsuit "meritless" and said the case is "based on the lie that there is a database of 'domestic terrorists' run by DHS." The government's motion to dismiss describes J.C.'s conduct as isolated and says DHS policy prohibits it. It also notes that J.C. "did not attempt to nominate any individuals to the terrorist watchlist." He just called one of them at home to suggest she might end up on it. Totally different.
The Chilling Effect Is Already Working
JoAnna Suriani, an attorney at Protect Democracy representing the observers, put it plainly to Wired: "The government is treating people who exercise their First Amendment rights and seek to hold it accountable as criminal suspects, and that's what we're asking the court to stop."
The plaintiffs are asking the court to order Williams' records archived, bar DHS from using the collected information against any of them, and prohibit agents in Maine from threatening observers with watchlists or following them to their homes. Those are not radical demands. Those are requests to stop doing things the government was doing.
The chilling effect is not theoretical at this point. According to the filing, Pantos stopped doing all ICE observation work after that phone call. Williams briefly kept going and then stopped too. That is the point of all of this. You don't need to arrest someone to silence them. You just need them to understand that you're watching.
The Dingo Take
ICE built surveillance dossiers on people whose only crime was standing near a parking lot, and a federal agent called one of them at home to float the phrase "domestic terrorism watchlist" until she stopped showing up.
The government's defense is basically: we didn't build a special database just for protesters, we just put protesters into the database we already had. The same database that automatically feeds border lookout records. The same database built and maintained by Palantir, which has been cashing nine-figure federal contracts while its software gets used to tag a woman as an "aggressive" threat because her driver's license photo resembled someone who once stood near an arrest. There is no version of this that is not a First Amendment crisis. Calling it "isolated conduct" while the named agent is sitting for depositions about his systematic practice is not a legal argument, it's a hope that nobody reads the footnotes.
The people who kept showing up to watch were doing exactly what a free society requires citizens to be able to do. The people who ran their plates, pulled their home addresses, called them on their personal phones, and entered them into a federal surveillance system were doing something the Constitution was specifically designed to prevent. One of those groups got scared into silence. The other one got a Palantir support contract renewal.
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