ICE Built a Machine to Hunt Immigrants. Now It's Hunting You.
ICE agents tracked an American father to a hotel room over an email he sent five months ago. He is a US citizen. He was never the target the public was told about.
At 9:55 at night, the front desk called David Streever’s hotel room in New York City. A federal agent was downstairs asking for him.
Streever is an American citizen. His crime was an email criticizing the director of ICE. For that, the government tracked him across an ocean and back, to a hotel room he had told no one about. He and his seven-year-old daughter had just flown in from Finland, cleared Customs at JFK, and checked in instead of going home to Rochester.
ICE found him anyway. To this day, no one will say how.
He was not the only one. Hours earlier, the same pair of agents had hunted down Paigelynne Gonyea, a poll worker in Syracuse, over an Instagram post criticizing an ICE officer. They tracked her to her polling station and handed her a letter demanding she delete her account and sign for it.
Neither of these people is an undocumented immigrant. Both are American citizens. Both were hunted by a machine the public was told existed to deport foreigners.
That is the whole story, and it is the part that should frighten American working people.
Because the machine is real and the money is public record. ICE bought Penlink’s Webloc, which lets agents draw a digital fence around any location and track every phone inside it. It bought mobile license plate readers from Motorola. It renewed a contract for a database of more than 20 billion plate scans. When the Supreme Court said in 2018 that police need a warrant for your phone location, the government simply started buying that data from commercial brokers instead. No warrant required.
This is not a glitch. It is the policy. In September 2025, Trump signed an executive order on “Domestic Terrorism” that treats opposition to ICE as a terrorist tactic and lists opposition to capitalism among the warning signs. The Justice Department has subpoenaed X and Reddit to unmask users who criticized the deportation program. They still have not been told what crime they are suspected of.
Every tool sold to you as protection from the outsider ends up pointed at you.
I publish all of this for free, and it stays free. If the work is worth something to you, becoming a paid member keeps it going. Either way, the door stays open.
Now some of you are going to say it: this guy lives in China, why is he a hypocrite talking about a surveillance state? China is a surveillance state.
Fair. Let’s talk about it.
Yes, China has surveillance. Yes, there’s a firewall. I’m not going to pretend otherwise.
But notice what you just did. You reached for China the second American surveillance got uncomfortable. That reflex has a name. It’s called feeling superior. And it only works if you actually live in a free country.
Do you?
Your government just tracked a man to his hotel room over an email. Your Justice Department is subpoenaing Reddit users for criticizing a policy. Your agents walked into a polling station to tell a woman to delete her Instagram.
And you still think the surveillance is happening somewhere else.
Here’s the part nobody wants to hear. Chinese people walk outside at night. Women walk home alone. Children ride the subway without fear. The infrastructure works. The streets are safe. You can argue all day about why that is. You cannot pretend it isn’t true.
Meanwhile American working people are getting shot in supermarkets, sleeping in their cars, and being hunted by data brokers their own government paid to access, all while being told they live in the land of the free.
You are not living in freedom. You are living in the story your government told you about freedom.
The truth hurts. But you should hear it. It is the truth.
It’s time to wake up.
