Trump Admin Used Israeli Doxing Website 'Canary Mission' to Target Israel's Critics for Deportation

NEW: "A senior ICE official testified that the agency assembled a team in early 2025 to investigate student protestors. The team—referred to internally as the “Tiger Team”—rapidly compiled over 100 reports based on a list of 5,000 people identified on the Canary Mission website."

— Prem Thakker (@prem_thakker) July 9, 2025

The trajectory of Canary: Run by Israeli right-wing activists < funded by mainstream American Jewish foundations < used by Israeli border officials to deny Palestinian Americans entry < Now used by DHS to round up students in the US and detain them and attempt to deport them

— Alex Kane (@alexbkane) July 9, 2025

As the Trump administration identified pro-Palestinian academics to target for deportation, it relied heavily on an anonymously-run pro-Israel website that has been criticized for doxxing, according to newly unsealed court documents and testimony at an ongoing trial.

To support President Donald Trump’s deportation drive, the Department of Homeland Security assembled a “tiger team” of intelligence analysts who built dossiers on about 100 foreign students and scholars engaged in pro-Palestinian activity, the records show.

More than 75 of those people were identified by the shadowy website Canary Mission, according to deposition testimony unveiled this week in a case challenging the Trump administration’s targeting of pro-Palestinian scholars.

[...] Testifying at the trial Wednesday, Homeland Security official Peter Hatch acknowledged the site’s significance to the Trump administration effort, but said any information taken from the site was independently verified.

[...] The unsealed court records also reveal for the first time how deeply involved the Trump White House — in particular top Trump aide Stephen Miller — was in the effort to revoke the visas of pro-Palestinian academics studying and teaching at American colleges.

The acting chief of the State Department’s Bureau of Consular Affairs, John Armstrong, testified that he’d had “at least a dozen” conversations with White House officials about the student deportation drive and that Miller was on interagency conference calls related to the issue “at one point at least weekly.”

According to Armstrong, the conference calls with Miller lasted about 15 minutes to an hour and involved other officials from the Homeland Security Council, the State Department and Homeland Security Department.

The extent of the White House’s involvement in singling out particular students remains unclear because the White House asserted executive privilege to conceal the details of Miller’s exchanges with agency officials.

Still, the revelations shed new light on the Trump administration’s aggressive efforts to target, detain and deport foreign academics who are living and working in the country legally. For months, Secretary of State Marco Rubio appeared to be the face of those efforts: He invoked a rarely used provision of immigration law to try to deport targeted scholars — including Mahmoud Khalil and Rumesya Ozturk — by declaring their presence in the U.S. in conflict with American foreign policy interests.

[...] In his deposition, Hatch said “more than 75 percent” of the names his “tiger team” prepared reports on came from Canary Mission, and he believed others came from Betar US, a group that uses the slogan “Jews fight back” and profiles pro-Palestinian activists on its website.

[...] Betar did not respond to a request for comment. However, within days of Trump’s return to the White House in January, Betar announced on X and in comments to news outlets that it had provided a “deport list” to Trump administration officials.