u/AnarchaMorrigan

When anti-ICE activists rallied against the Trump administration’s deportation campaign in Minneapolis, many relied on the encrypted messaging app Signal for secure communications. In activist chats and quickly established ICE-tracking groups, locals used Signal to keep tabs on federal agents patrolling their communities.

When the Department of Homeland Security announced this week the arrest of 15 alleged “anti-ICE rioters” in Minnesota, it pointed directly at their Signal chats.

The indictment is in large part built upon on conversations from more than a dozen Signal groups, citing more than 100 specific messages. The case is a stark reminder that using an encrypted messaging platform like Signal is not in and of itself a magic bullet to safeguard communications. It also raises the question: How did Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations unit gain access to all of these communications in the first place?

The indictment doesn’t provide a clear answer. But sprinkled throughout the document are clues that suggest that law enforcement may have gained access to the physical devices of some of those indicted.

The 15 people named in the latest indictment are all charged with “conspiracy to impede or injure an officer,” with some facing additional charges like “solicitation to commit a crime of violence” and “destruction of government property.” Though some of the accused had court appearances on Tuesday, their defense attorneys have not as of yet been named.

The indictment comes months after FBI Director Kash Patel said in a podcast interview that federal law enforcement had started an investigation into Minnesota ICE watchers using Signal groups to share information about immigration agents.

The bulk of the indictment consists of transcripts of group messages; at various points it also makes mention of voicemails, text messages, Signal direct messages, and Signal calls. For instance, the indictment in one spot mentions that two of the indictees “exchanged approximately 20 connected Signal calls.” This hints that authorities were able to access not just group chat messages, but likely had wholesale access to the devices of at least some of those indicted.

The Signal app provides end-to-end encryption, protecting communications in transit, so that anyone monitoring your internet or cellular data connection cannot see the contents of your messages. Signal also minimizes the amount of metadata collected, so if the organization behind the app, the Signal Foundation, was served with a compulsory legal process to reveal user information, it wouldn’t even know with whom you spoke or chatted.

But all that falls apart if your device gets into the wrong hands.

There’s a lot of profit in paying immigrants a dollar a day to run their own jail—until they refuse.

It has now been almost two weeks since the laborers keeping ICE’s Delaney Hall mega-jail open went on strike—demanding a chance to speak with New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill, reviews of their cases, and ultimately, their freedom. Those workers are the detainees themselves, who serve as custodians, line cooks, hairdressers, laundry workers, and janitors at the Newark prison-turned-detention center where a thousand people are trapped in DHS custody, working for wages as low as a dollar per day.

What began as a simultaneous hunger and labor strike has become largely a labor struggle, organizers with the immigrant rights group Cosecha New Jersey told me. That strike, according to a letter signed by 46 detained people and published June 3, is near-unanimous and ongoing: “people detained have all voluntarily stopped working and assisting with facility operations,” they wrote in a May 31 letter titled “We Demand Freedom.” 

The for-profit firm GEO Group, ICE’s largest private contractor and Delaney Hall’s operator, runs what it calls a “voluntary work program” that in effect keeps the center operating, described in a recent GEO Group detainee handbook reviewed by Mother Jones. 

While work is supposedly voluntary, “encouraging others to participate in a work stoppage or to refuse to work” is a “high offense” punishable by disciplinary transfer, isolation, or criminal proceedings. 
“Any resident assigned to work in the kitchen will be paid $4.00 per day,” the handbook says. That’s the highest wage anyone gets: “Laundry Work Details and Barbershop Workers will be paid $3.00 per day. Special Work Details are paid $2.00 per day. All other job assignments are $1.00 per day. Ordinarily you will not be permitted to work more than eight hours per day or 40 hours per week.” 

The document also lists the cost of a pair of shoes at GEO Group’s commissary: $24.28, equivalent to several weeks’ wages. A blanket costs eight dollars. ID cards, which detained people must pay to replace if damaged, cost $5 each, or a full week’s pay. 

While the work program is labeled as voluntary, “encouraging others to participate in a work stoppage or to refuse to work” is listed in the detainee handbook as a “high offense,” punishable by disciplinary transfer, isolation, or initiating criminal proceedings. 

“Engaging in, or inciting a group demonstration” is also a “high offense” and “prohibited act.” And, the detained strikers wrote in their June 3 letter, they have been “subjected to reprisals, discrimination, mockery, mistreatment, and threats” since their strike began. 

“They are trying to force us to work in all areas of the facility (cleaning, kitchen, maintenance, laundry, floor polishing)” they wrote, adding that GEO Group staffers threaten “to deport us, transfer us to punishment units, and move us from one detention center to another” if they refuse to work. “They tell us we have no rights here.” 

“They don’t have cleaning staff, they don’t have kitchen staff,” said Cat Adorno, an organizer with Cosecha. “Those jobs, the detainees are the ones that do that.” 

“We’re hearing that the place is becoming really dirty, that it started to smell like feces, that the guards have become incredibly aggressive, threatening them that if they don’t resume their work, they’re going to get transferred or get additional charges,” Adorno added. 

The profit margins of facilities like Delaney Hall depend on coercing people into working for otherwise illegal rates, Andrew Free, an immigration lawyer and journalist who researches conditions in ICE detention, said. “The way you keep the place clean is you use the people who are inside to clean it.” 

Those dollar-a-day rates have held since 1950, when they were established by Congress. It was keyed to the “international standard for prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions, which was three Swiss francs.”  Since then, several courts have ruledthat the Fair Labor Standards Act, which sets the federal minimum wage, does not applyto people detained by ICE. But the legal battle isn’t over: there are now more than a dozen lawsuits making their way through the courts regarding involuntary work for unjust pay in ICE detention.

GEO Group staffers did not answer questions about the strike, or about whether Delaney Hall cleaning and kitchen staff can sustain the facility without the labor of detained people. 
**“**In all instances, our support services are monitored by ICE, including by on-site agency personnel…to ensure compliance with ICE’s detention standards and contract requirements,” a GEO Group spokesperson wrote in a statement. 

Facilities like Delaney Hall are profitable in part because they can compel detained people to work for otherwise illegal rates.

For more than a year, a group of union activists calling itself “Labor Eyes On ICE” has held monthly vigils at Delaney Hall—and on Sunday, members of at least 12 unions, including the Teamsters and the American Federation of Teachers, picketed on a dusty road just under half a mile from the building, prevented from getting within detainees’ earshot by barricades and lines of police. 

Teachers and librarians showed up to chant and picket, as did Amazon warehouse workers and university clerical staff. In a nearby tent, masked medics wearing red-tape crosses on their arms handed out goggles to protect people from tear gas—and told me quietly that in their day-to-day lives, many of them are unionized medical professionals. 

Mitch Israel, an organizer with the Teamsters at Amazon, had the ties between that company and ICE on his mind outside Delaney Hall this week: “Amazon actually loses money on its package delivering business most years,” he said, “and it funds that by using its cloud computing platform, Amazon Web Services, to get huge contracts with ICE, with Palantir, and other groups that allow it to fund its abuse of workers. There is a direct connection between these things.”

“This fight actually goes beyond Delaney Hall and back to our employers and our workplaces,” said Isaac Jimenez, a member of the administrative workers’ union at Rutgers University. At his employer, students, staff and faculty “have been calling for a sanctuary campus for over a year.” 

“We’re supporting and uplifting the demands of the striking detainees and calling for this place to be shut down, calling on our governor, Mikie Sherrill, to meet with the strikers, and to help shut this place down as well,” Jimenez added. “I know it’s only really gotten to a head in the past 10 days, but this movement’s been growing for over a year, since Delaney Hall’s been reopened.” On Thursday, 13 days into the strike, Sherrill announced a $12 million increase in funding for legal services—enough to fund legal aid for “all low-income detainees in Delaney Hall.”
By withholding their labor, Free said, detained people “are in a real way hitting GEO where it hurts.” They are undermining the company’s revenue, “which is why the repression is so harsh.” 

But it’s generally cheaper to let people go than to transfer strikers to different facilities, Free said. So when some detained people are released—like an 18-year-old who was freedfrom Delaney Hall earlier this week after missing her high school prom—“that is just as much a predictable consequence of these hunger and labor strikes as the repression and retaliation.”

"Conditions at an ICE facility in the high desert of Southern California are so bad that at least 20 people detained there have declared a hunger strike. 

“There are many people suffering here. This is the only way we have to raise our voice, this is a call to stop the suffering and respect our dignity as human beings,” read a statement written by the strikers and read during an press conference held online this morning held by a coalition of advocacy groups. 

"The immigrants at the Adelanto ICE detention complex have not eaten since Tuesday. They are demanding “due process, bond reform, improved conditions, adequate medical and mental health care, nutritious food, accountability for deaths, and the right to organize and communicate” according to their statement...."