For nearly two years, students at Columbia University have warned that they’re being targeted — and put in serious danger — by right-wing Zionist organizations like Canary Mission and Betar US. Canary Mission’s goal was initially to “expose” students it deemed antisemitic, ideally in the hopes that they’d be denied jobs and other opportunities. In the aftermath of October 7th, students who were targeted by Canary Mission and similar groups said they experienced a surge of online harassment that increasingly spilled over into real life. The stakes were raised further upon Donald Trump’s reelection. Under Trump’s brutal immigration enforcement regime, these doxing databases have turned into tools of the state, making protesters visible and vulnerable to immigration enforcement. A senior Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) official has appeared to confirm that the students were right.
Peter Hatch, the assistant director of ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) division, testified in court last Wednesday and Thursday that the Trump administration is using lists compiled by private groups to go after activists. In March, he said, his unit was told to urgently review a list of over 5,000 people to evaluate for deportation. The workload required moving analysts who typically work on counterterrorism and cybercrime to a “tiger team” dedicated solely to pro-Palestine protesters. At least 75 percent of the names had been provided by Canary Mission, Hatch said. (Canary Mission did not immediately reply to The Verge’s request for comment.)
If it seemed like too much attention was paid to the protests at one specific Ivy League campus last year, the tensions at Columbia turned out to be a bellwether of what would soon happen across the country. The program Hatch described appears to be an unprecedentedly sweeping and high-stakes example of a growing pipeline between private harassment and government action. For years, Republicans have drawn political fodder from online outrage. Congressional Republicans released tech executives’ internal communications to support their claim that social media platforms censored conservative voices online. Chaya Raichik, the woman behind Libs of TikTok, graduated from siccing her X, TikTok, and Instagram followers on LGBTQ students and teachers to advising Oklahoma’s Department of Education. Before his public falling out with Trump, Elon Musk directed harassment campaigns against federal employees whose jobs he believed should be cut by the Department of Government Efficiency. ICE’s reliance on information gleaned from — and at times manipulated or misrepresented by — far-right Zionist groups is an escalation that Columbia students have been warning about for years.
“There’s been absolutely no recourse this entire time,” said Maryam Alwan, a Palestinian student who graduated from Columbia this year and was involved in campus activism before and after Israel’s invasion of Gaza. In her time at Columbia, Alwan was subject to harassment from a coterie of individuals and organizations, including Canary Mission, an anonymous X page called Documenting Jew Hatred on Campus, and former Columbia professor Shai Davidai. “It really causes this sense of fear, especially among Palestinian students. They tend to go after Palestinian students the most.”
Upon Trump’s reelection, some of these groups began identifying noncitizen activists who could be targeted for deportation. In his two-day testimony, Hatch said that senior officials with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the federal agency that houses ICE, urged him to expedite the tiger team’s research into and reports on student activists. The first step was combing through the names on the list, which included both citizens and noncitizens, to determine who was deportable. HSI ultimately submitted between 100 and 200 reports to the State Department.
The anonymously run Canary Mission website has been active for nearly a decade, but its efforts intensified after Hamas’ October 7th attack on Israel and the long, brutal invasion of the Gaza strip that followed. Its website claims to document and denounce people who “promote hatred of the US, Israel, and Jews” and includes thousands of names and allegations of antisemitism. They range from chanting “from the river to the sea” and writing op-eds to “providing material support for terror groups,” though Alwan said she and several of her friends have been baselessly accused of the latter. Canary Mission deliberately conflates any pro-Palestinian stances with antisemitism. Overall, the list amounts to a smear campaign against pro-Palestinian activists, including those involved in Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions campaigns.
Canary Mission’s database, alongside similar lists from other groups, provides an easy pool of harassment targets. In the fall of 2023, a box truck covered in LED screens started driving around Columbia’s campus in Morningside Heights. The truck, which had been paid for by the conservative nonprofit Accuracy in Media, showed the names and photos of dozens of students it deemed “Columbia’s Leading Antisemites,” gathered from a list of students who were current or former members of organizations that signed onto a statement expressing solidarity with Palestinians.
“We were very adamant in trying to make the administration aware of our safety concerns, but we realized they weren’t going to do anything. They just stonewalled,” Alwan said. Columbia announced it was putting together a “doxing resource group” that November, but Alwan said it amounted to letting students input their information into a scrubbing site. “They did not ever take any action against the students or the faculty that were constantly doxxing us,” she added.
When Trump returned to office, he threw the power of the state behind these efforts. In March, ICE agents arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian Columbia graduate student who had negotiated with the university on students’ behalf. Khalil has a green card and no criminal background. To justify his arrest, ICE and the State Department claimed that Khalil’s mere presence in the United States is harmful to the US’s foreign policy interests. Just one day before ICE showed up at his door, Khalil emailed Columbia’s interim president, saying he had been the victim of a “vicious, coordinated, and dehumanizing doxxing campaign” led by a Columbia professor.
Khalil’s arrest was a harbinger of more to come — and the other students and activists ICE arrested were also targeted by Canary Mission and other groups. Tufts student Rümeysa Öztürk was arrested for writing an op-ed asking the university to “acknowledge the Palestinian genocide” and divest its endowment from companies with ties to Israel, which the Department of Homeland Security claimed was proof that she had “engaged in activities in support of Hamas.” Badar Khan Suri, a postdoctoral fellow at Georgetown University, was arrested outside his home in Virginia. Columbia graduate student Mohsen Mahdawi was arrested during a naturalization interview with US Citizenship and Immigration Services. Other students were also targeted. DHS posted a video of Ranjani Srinivasan, a Columbia doctoral candidate who was in the country on an F-1 student visa, “self-deporting” after she learned that ICE agents had been looking for her.
Öztürk’s dossier, unveiled in court proceedings, included her op-ed in the student newspaper and her Canary Mission page. Khalil’s dossier included news clips about his involvement in Columbia’s protests, as well as his Canary Mission page.
The Trump administration has in fact warned of the risks of doxxing — of its own armed, masked, and unidentified ICE agents. The agents who detained Öztürk were masked; the agents who arrested Khalil did not initially identify themselves by name. In other words, the government is relying on dox lists to arrest noncitizens for exercising free speech while also claiming that ICE agents should remain unidentified for their safety.
The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) sued the Trump administration over its arrests of student activists, claiming it’s chilled political speech and violated the First Amendment with an“ideological deportation policy.” Whatever the outcome, though, the campaign of fear has already been effective.
J., a Columbia graduate student who asked to be referred to by their first initial because they fear retribution against noncitizen family members, told The Verge they were initially hesitant to get involved in campus protests because other students had been doxed.
“I kind of stayed away because of how militarized and surveilled our campus was,” J. said, ultimately changing their mind in the spring of 2025 after ICE arrested Khalil and other noncitizen students. “I was like, ‘Screw it. This is something bigger than me,’” said J., who is a US citizen. J. was one of the students who occupied Columbia’s library in May — and was doxxed shortly afterward. Canary Mission posted the students’ names and photos. The conservative Washington Free Beacon wrote a story on the nonbinary “they-tifada” that stormed the library.
By that point, J. said, a lot of students who were in the country on visas or green cards had “started to minimize the space they take up in the advocacy world for fear of repercussions,” including the threat of deportation. “The federal government is obviously taking an approach that is quite effective in scaring people into submission.”
George Wang, a staff attorney at Columbia’s Knight First Amendment Institute — which filed the suit against the Trump administration alongside the AAUP and Columbia’s Middle East Studies Association — said the recent wave of arrests amounts to a major escalation against student protesters.
“For a long time — and especially the last year and a half — there have been plenty of reasons why people who have engaged in pro-Palestinian speech and advocacy may have felt chilled, particularly on college campuses,” Wang said. But doxxing trucks and disciplinary action are “an entirely different category of harm than the potential of being arrested, detained, moved to detention in Louisiana, and possibly deported for engaging in that speech. The threat of deportation weighs so much more heavily on people than any threat of doxxing ever could.”
Alwan said the same groups who have called for the deportation of student activists are now engaging in lawfare against US citizens. She is one of four defendants in a lawsuit claiming that campus activists had foreknowledge of the October 7th attack and were “aiding and abetting Hamas’ continuing acts of international activism.”
“This lawsuit is based off of the same doxxing and harassment that was created over a year ago,” Alwan said. “Canary Mission is basically functioning as a hit list. We don’t know who’s funding it, there’s no accountability, and a lot of what’s on there is just completely made up in the first place.”
