Starting in October 2025 DHS launched Operation Black Rose in Oregon which combined new intrusive surveillance (facial recognition, drones, massive data-scraping and more) with aggressive and often violent warrantless arrests of immigrants and people perceived to be immigrants. Since Operation Black Rose was deployed, DHS detentions grew rapidly as part of a national trend.
The court transcripts from the proceedings along with the recently released video evidence (video 1, video 2) submitted to the court shows how the surveillance technology allowed DHS database systems to supplant constitutional and statutory law.
As the transcripts show, a Palantir-developed platform called “ELITE” was newly given to ICE in 2025 and ICE used it in Oregon as part of Operation Black Rose. The platform allows ICE to throw an electronic dragnet over an entire geographic region using data from numerous sources. No warrants are needed and no individualized suspicion is required for the platform to create geographic targets and thereby target all the people in the area. Rather, individuals with an “immigration nexus” (because they appear in DHS databases or a database that DHS has access to) will appear as a pin on a map. DHS uses ELITE to deploy agents to that area to sweep people up. Other surveillance tools are used on site such as Mobile Fortify that scan faces. In the video, an individual who was arrested without any individualized suspicion—not a single agent knew his name or for any of the other people who were in the van— had his face forcibly scanned by an agent.
In court, agents testified that Mobile Fortify was used to scan faces and admitted that the results were not accurate. One agent described Mobile Fortify as “a database that allows you to use your mobile phone; hold it up to the face of someone who is a potential immigration violator; and then, using facial recognition technology, they try -- the application tries to identify that person quickly.” Tr. at 158.
A DHS agent testified about how she forcibly used Mobile Fortify with consent and the system failed.
From the court hearing:
AGENT: So then I remember I moved her shoulder back. And she complained because I did forget she had handcuffs on and – like, behind her back. And she kind of, like, yelped, like if I had caused pain, like a lot of pain…And I said (speaking Spanish). I said, "I need to take your photo." So I took her photo, where she kind of looked at me. And then when I looked down at my mobile query, it came up to a very -- like, a similar person. I wasn't sure if it was her or not….And then I tried taking her photo again, and this time it came up to someone else. I can't recall the name, but we used that name as well, "Are you this person?" She looked at us. Like, I remember her eyebrows kind of like -- like, "Who are you talking about?" She gave us that look.
The use of massive surveillance tools, like the ELITE and Mobile Fortify apps, raises grave concerns that DHS is trying to unlawfully by-pass the Fourth Amendment’s warrant and particularity requirements. By using these surveillance technologies, DHS conducts community-level profiling that treats a person’s neighborhood or town as a “target” for detention.
