ICE task force officers logged Spokane protesters' license plates and personal data into an evidence database

On June 11, 2025, Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) analyst Ryan Lid recorded license plates of protesters gathered outside U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement's Spokane, Washington field office, and Spokane Police Department detective Stacey Carr — acting as an HSI task force officer — drove an unmarked vehicle through the crowd to record additional plates Lid could not see, later uploading the license-plate numbers and video to Axon's Evidence.com digital evidence platform. The activity followed weeks of similar surveillance: on May 22, 2025, Carr watched and tried to identify a man who photographed a tour bus and a state trooper's vehicle outside the ICE building, mistaking it for a possible immigration transport; on June 10, 2025, Carr ran the plate of a driver who parked near the ICE lot without leaving his car, then uploaded his photo and confirmed identity to Evidence.com. None of the individuals were stated to be under investigation for any wrongdoing.

HSI is normally tasked with investigating serious federal crimes such as human trafficking and child exploitation, but in September 2025 then-acting ICE Director Todd Lyons said the agency would deploy HSI agents against anti-ICE protesters, calling demonstrators in Chicago "paid professional agitators" engaged in "domestic terrorism." Carr's July 2025 police report, obtained via public records request and first reported by Mother Jones on July 27, 2026, documented license plate numbers, vehicle descriptions, and the names and addresses of registered owners collected during the Spokane protests and logged to Evidence.com, a cloud-based evidence-management system owned by Axon Enterprise.

A Spokane Police Department spokesperson said Carr's uploads are accessible only to SPD employees and that the department is "investigating why the detective was engaged in these activities," while noting HSI's Internet Crimes Against Children unit, where Carr also serves as a task force officer, is on a different floor than ICE. ICE did not respond to Mother Jones' request for comment. Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression senior attorney Adam Steinbaugh called the license-plate logging "a throwback to the 1960s era" of FBI surveillance of political meetings, saying that recording protesters' movements is "the first step towards acting on that speech."

The disclosure surfaces amid a broader, separate dispute over whether DHS maintains a centralized "domestic terrorist" database of ICE protest observers. Carr's report shows that no such standalone database is necessary for HSI personnel to systematically collect and retain identifying information on people who observe or protest ICE operations using existing commercial evidence software.