The Trump administration’s increasingly aggressive attempts to crack down on people who monitor or protest its widely unpopular immigration policies have been well documented. Those efforts have included federal indictments and pressure campaigns against Big Tech. Now documents newly obtained by The Guardian show the government surveilled activists who were monitoring its activities outside immigration court proceedings earlier this summer in New York City.

The documents, which were given to The Guardian by government transparency group Property of the People and haven’t been independently verified by MS NOW, show how the feds accessed messages sent by activists on encrypted messaging platform Signal.

Per The Guardian:

The FBI, the documents show, gained access to conversations in a ‘courtwatch’ Signal group that helps coordinate volunteer activists who monitor public proceedings at three New York federal immigration courts. The US government has repeatedly been accused of violating immigrants’ due process rights at those courts. A ‘joint situational information report’ from the FBI and the New York police department (NYPD), dated 28 August 2025, quoted from a chat on Signal, the encrypted messaging app, and also characterized the court watchers as ‘anarchist violent extremist actors’. The two-page report was distributed to other law enforcement agencies across the US.

The report offered no evidence to support the claim that the “courtwatch” group consists of “anarchist violent extremist actors,” and the FBI didn’t respond to The Guardian’s request to provide evidence. But given that the goal of such groups is to ensure federal immigration laws and proper procedures are followed, it’s hard to align that with an “anarchist” agenda.

How the administration acquired the messages is unclear, according to The Guardian. The report states that the information came from a “sensitive source with excellent access” and warns about “extremist actors targeting law enforcement officers and federal facilities.”

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Both the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI declined to comment to The Guardian on the report, and an NYPD spokesperson told the outlet, “This is not an NYPD document … This investigation has been reviewed by an external civilian representative exercising oversight pursuant to court order.”

Numerous viral videos have documented federal agents in New York targeting people at immigration proceedings, inflicting violence on immigrants’ family members and journalists alike.

In recent months, the Trump administration has continued to face widespread backlash and public discontent over its bigoted mass incarceration and deportation agenda, which has also ensnared scores of U.S. citizens.

The administration has only gotten more aggressive in its effort to get control of the narrative around immigration enforcement. My colleague Steve Benen recently noted the push by DHS to pressure social media companies to remove unflattering content — a hypocritical gambit from a conservative movement that spent years claiming to oppose government interference in what social media companies allow on their platforms.