Private groups work to identify and report U.S. student protesters for possible deportation

A protestor waves a Palestinian flag at the University of New Mexico Palestine solidarity encampment in Albuquerque, N.M., on May 14, 2024. (Chancey Bush/The Albuquerque Journal via AP, File)

NEW YORK — When a protester was caught on video in January at a New York rally against Israel, only her eyes were visible between a mask and headscarf. But days later, photos of her entire face, along with her name and employer, were circulated online.

“Months of them hiding their faces went down the drain!” a fledgling technology company boasted in a social media post, claiming its facial-recognition tool had identified the woman despite the coverings.

She was anything but a lone target. The same software was also used to review images taken during months of pro-Palestinian marches at U.S. colleges. A right-wing Jewish group said some people identified with the tool were on a list of names it submitted to U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration, urging that they be deported in accordance with his call for the expulsion of foreign students who participated in “pro-jihadist” protests.

Other pro-Israel groups have enlisted help from supporters on campuses, urging them to report foreign students who participated in protests against the war in Gaza to the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency.

The push to identify masked protesters using facial recognition and turn them in is blurring the line between public law enforcement and private groups. And the efforts have stirred anxiety among foreign students worried that activism could jeopardize their legal status.

“It’s a very concerning practice. We don’t know who these individuals are or what they’re doing with this information,” said Abed Ayoub, national executive director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. “Essentially the administration is outsourcing surveillance.”

It’s unclear whether names from outside groups have reached top government officials. But concern about the pursuit of activists has risen since the March 8 arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University graduate student of Palestinian descent who helped lead demonstrations against Israel’s conduct of the war.

Immigration officers also detained a Tufts University student from Turkey outside Boston this week, and Trump and other officials have said that more arrests of international students are coming.

“Now they’re using tools of the state to actually go after people,” said a Columbia graduate student from South Asia who has been active in protests and spoke on condition of anonymity because of concerns about losing her visa. “We suddenly feel like we’re being forced to think about our survival.”

Uncertainty about the consequences

Ayoub said he is concerned, in part, that groups bent on exposing pro-Palestinian activists will make mistakes and single out students who did nothing wrong.

Some groups pushing for deportations say their focus is on students whose actions go beyond marching in protests, to those taking over campus buildings and inciting violence against Jewish students.

“If you’re here, right, on a student visa causing civil unrest ... assaulting people on the streets, chanting for people’s death, why the heck did you come to this country?” said Eliyahu Hawila, a software engineer who built the tool designed to identify masked protesters and outed the woman at the January rally.

He has forwarded protesters’ names to groups pressing for them to be deported, disciplined, fired or otherwise punished.

“If we want to argue that this is freedom of speech and they can say it, fine, they can say it,” Hawila said. “But that doesn’t mean that you will escape the consequences of society after you say it.”

Pro-Israel groups that circulated the protester’s photo claim that she was soon fired by her employer. An employee who answered the phone at the company confirmed that the woman had not worked there since early this year. In a brief phone conversation, the protester, who has not been charged with any wrongdoing, declined to comment on the advice of an attorney.

Calls to report students to the government

The unearthing and spreading of personal information to harass opponents has become commonplace in the uproar over the war in Gaza. The practice, known as doxing, has been used to expose both activists in the U.S. and Israeli soldiers who recorded video of themselves on the battlefield.

But the use of facial-recognition technology by private groups enters territory previously reserved largely for law enforcement, said attorney Sejal Zota, who represents a group of California activists in a lawsuit against facial recognition company ClearviewAI.

“We’re focused on government use of facial recognition because that’s who we think of as traditionally tracking and monitoring dissent,” Zota said. But “there are now all of these groups who are sort of complicit in that effort.”

The calls to report protesters to immigration authorities have raised the stakes.

“Please tell everyone you know who is at a university to file complaints about foreign students and faculty who support Hamas,” Elizabeth Rand, president of a group called Mothers Against Campus Antisemitism, said in a Jan. 21 post to more than 60,000 followers on Facebook. It included a link to an ICE tip line.

Rand’s post was one of several publicized by New York University’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors. Rand did not respond to messages seeking comment. NYU has dismissed criticism that she had any influence with its administrators.

In early February, messages from a different group were posted in an online chat group frequented by Israelis living in New York.

“Do you know students at Columbia or any other university who are here on a study visa and participated in demonstrations against Israel?” one message said in Hebrew. “If so, now is our time!”

An accompanying message in English by the group End Jew Hatred included a link to the ICE hotline. The group did not respond to requests for comment.

Facial recognition looms over protests

Weeks before Khalil’s arrest, a spokesman for right-wing Jewish group Betar said the activist topped a list of foreign students and faculty from nine universities it submitted to officials, including then-incoming Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who made the decision to revoke Khalil’s visa.

Rubio was asked this week how the names of students targeted for visa revocation were reaching his desk and whether colleges or outside groups were providing information. He declined to answer.

“We’re not going to talk about the process by which we’re identifying it because obviously we’re looking for more people,” he told reporters late Thursday during the return flight from a diplomatic trip to Suriname.

In a one-sentence statement, the Department of Homeland Security, which includes ICE, said the immigration agency is not “working with” Betar, nor has it received any hotline tips from the group. But DHS declined to answer specific questions from The Associated Press about how it was treating reports from outside groups or the usage of facial recognition.

Betar spokesman Daniel Levy said that some people on its list were identified using the facial-recognition tool called NesherAI created by Hawila’s company, Stellar Technologies, which was launched from his Brooklyn apartment. The software takes its name from the Hebrew word for “eagle.”

Demonstrating the software for a reporter recently, Hawila paused repeatedly to tweak computer code to account for what he said was the just-completed ingestion of thousands of additional photos scraped from social media accounts.

After some delay, the software matched a screenshot of a fully masked protester — seen on video confronting Hawila at a recent march — with publicity photos of a woman who described herself online as a New York artist. He said he would report her to the police for assault.

Hawila, a native of Lebanon, is no stranger to controversy. He was the subject of news stories in 2021 when, after marrying an ultra-orthodox woman in New York, he was confronted with accusations that he lied about being Jewish. Religious authorities have since confirmed that his mother was Jewish and certified his faith, he said.

Hawila said he no longer works directly with Betar but continues to share protesters’ names with it and other pro-Israel groups and said he has discussed licensing his software to some of them. He showed an email exchange with one group that appeared to confirm such contact.

“Technology, when used in good ways, makes the world a better place,” he said.

Trump promised to crack down during campaign

As a candidate, Trump campaigned on a promise to crack down on campus antisemitism and threatened to deport activists with student visas that he called violent radicals.

Soon after the election, Betar claimed on social media that it was working to identify and report international student protesters to the incoming administration.

“Entire university departments have been corrupted by jihadis,” Levy said in a recent e-mail exchange with the AP.

Days before his arrest, Khalil said in an interview that he was aware of Betar’s call for his deportation and that it and other groups were trying to use him as a “scapegoat.”

Students protesting Israel’s conduct in Gaza have been unsure what to make of Betar, which the Anti-Defamation League recently added to its list of extremist groups. The ADL has also voiced support for revoking the visas of foreign student activists.

At the University of Pittsburgh, leaders of Students for Justice in Palestine said they spoke with police in November after an online message from Betar that said it would be visiting the school to “give you beepers” — an apparent reference to Israel’s detonation of thousands of electronic pagers last fall to kill and wound members of Lebanon’s Hezbollah militia.

Ross Glick, who was Betar’s executive director at the time, said that the message was “a tongue-in-cheek dark joke,” not a threat.

Both sides said police eventually decided no action was warranted. Months later, Betar said that Pitt students were among those on its deportation list.

Students dependent on visas fear being targeted

The efforts to target protesters have fueled anxiety among international students involved in campus activism.

“They’ve abducted someone on our campus, and that is a key source of our fear,” said the Columbia student from South Asia.

She recounted cancelling spring break plans to travel to Canada, where her husband lives, for fear she would not be allowed to reenter the U.S. She has also shut down her social media accounts to avoid drawing attention to pro-Palestinian posts.

And, because her apartment is off campus, she said she offered accommodation to other international students who live in university housing and are wary of visits by immigration officers.

Leaders of Students for Justice in Palestine chapters at George Washington University and Pittsburgh said some international students have asked to have their email addresses and names removed from membership lists to avoid scrutiny.

A Columbia graduate student from the United Kingdom said that when he joined a pro-Palestinian encampment last year, he never considered whether it might affect his immigration status.

Now he’s rethinking an incident in October, when someone scattered fliers in a campus lounge celebrating the 2023 Hamas attack on Israel that sparked the war. A classmate who supports Israel accused him and others in the room of being responsible for the fliers and snapped their photos, according to the student, who said he had nothing to do with the material distributed.

“My main worry … is that he shared those photos and identified us and shared it with a larger group of people,” the student said.

Other students have been dismayed by an atmosphere that encourages students to inform on their classmates.

“It really bothered me because this cultivates this environment of reporting on each other. It kind of gives memories of dictatorship and autocratic regimes,” said Sahar Bostock, who was among a group of Israeli students at Columbia who wrote an open letter criticizing efforts to report pro-Palestinian protesters.

“I had to say, ‘Do you think this is right?‘”

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Associated Press reporters Jake Offenhartz and Noreen Nasir in New York and Matthew Lee in Miami contributed to this report.

Adam Geller, The Associated Press