State-Sponsored Doxxing and Dragnet Stops

How an Occupation Playbook Is Coming Home

The practices outlined in recent reports about U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) - including state-sponsored doxxing, dragnet stops, demands for proof of citizenship without cause, and treating proximity to a target as suspicion - mirror tactics long honed by Israel against Palestinians in the occupied territories.

These methods, refined through decades of occupation in Gaza and the West Bank, involve arbitrary checkpoints, mass surveillance, racial profiling, public shaming, and collective punishment, all under the guise of security. This isn’t mere coincidence; it’s the result of direct collaborations, joint trainings, and technology transfers between the IDF and ICE. Gaza, in particular, has served as a global testing ground for these oppressive tools, exported worldwide after being “battle-tested” on Palestinians.

The international community’s failure to halt the atrocities in Gaza…often described as enabling genocide through arms sales, funding, and diplomatic cover…has normalized such violations, allowing them to “come home to roost” in places like the U.S. border. What began as control over a besieged population is now eroding civil liberties in America, turning everyday interactions into potential interrogations and fostering a culture of fear and intimidation.

What’s Being Reported

Senior ICE officials have outlined plans to create a database of individuals who “attack” or criticize the agency, publicizing their names and faces while contacting their employers, schools, and neighborhoods to expose them. Video footage and eyewitness accounts depict Border Patrol agents stopping and threatening U.S. citizens at gas stations, demanding ID and questioning citizenship…”How do I know you’re a U.S. citizen?” without any traffic violation, crime, or legal basis.

Additionally, a government prosecutor with alleged ties to white-supremacist content has reportedly resumed duties in immigration court following an opaque investigation. https://www.texasobserver.org/ice-prosecutor-racist-account-back-at-immigration-court/

These reports echo Israel’s longstanding practices against Palestinians. For instance, the IDF maintains extensive databases like the “Blue Wolf” system, which uses facial recognition to track and expose Palestinians, often leading to arbitrary arrests or public shaming. Palestinians face routine demands for papers at checkpoints, where failure to immediately prove identity can result in detention or violence. In Gaza, entire communities are subjected to dragnet operations based on proximity to suspected targets, much like ICE’s proposed model. These parallels are fueled by direct exchanges: ICE agents train with the IDF through programs like those run by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), learning tactics such as aggressive profiling and surveillance honed in occupied territories. Whistleblowers have noted how these trainings import “oppression tactics,” including treating civilians as threats, directly from Palestine to U.S. enforcement.

A chilling recent example surfaced in a viral TikTok video reposted on X, where a woman recounts witnessing ICE agents in Minneapolis engage in what amounts to an extrajudicial abduction to cover up their own recklessness.

In the video, she describes arriving at the scene after responding to an ICE sighting:

“Today as I was responding to an ICE sighting, I watched a Ford Explorer filled with ICE agents blow through a stop sign, T-boned someone on accident and then kidnapped the driver that they T-boned. That was their way of cleaning up their mess.”

She clarifies it wasn’t a targeted suspect or protester, just an innocent driver in the wrong place:

“This was not someone they were pursuing, it was not someone, a suspect on their list, this was not even a protester. They just blew through a stop sign accidentally T-boning someone and instead of calling police and waiting for an ambulance...they got out of their Ford Explorer, approached the driver’s side broken window...ripped that driver from his vehicle, threw him in the back of their Ford Explorer driving off kidnapping this man.”

The woman expresses shock at the normalization of such acts:

“We’re not okay you guys... I am seeing things like this every day but it’s also happening to people who are just driving through the neighborhood... getting T-boned and then kidnapped.”

She urges viewers to monitor Minneapolis and St. Paul, boost visibility despite platform violations on her account, and support local immigrant-owned businesses. She also references Governor Walz’s recent press conference acknowledging the situation’s gravity.

Eyewitness replies: I saw ICE “abduct a man on 26th and Pleasant, then drive up on a sidewalk unnecessarily and plow into a parked car,” suggesting intent rather than accident.

Another notes similar purposeful rammings in Chicago to provoke exits from vehicles for abductions.

This tactic of “disappearing” individuals-seizing them without process, explanation, or family notification-directly parallels Israel’s routine abductions in the occupied territories. The IDF employs administrative detention to hold Palestinians indefinitely without charges or trials, often snatching them in night raids, vehicle intercepts, or broad-daylight operations that involve blockades or collisions to isolate targets.

In Gaza, such vanishings are commonplace under the siege, where people can be taken from streets or homes and held in secret, mirroring the ICE incident’s cover-up of an accident through kidnapping. These practices, tested and refined on Palestinians, are exported via joint trainings and tech, enabling U.S. agencies to erode due process in similar ways.

Why This Matters in Plain Language

1. It Turns Everyone Nearby into a Suspect: ICE’s approach allows agents to detain people simply for being near a target, transforming routine activities like pumping gas or walking in public into grounds for seizure. This mirrors IDF operations in the West Bank, where Palestinians in “proximity” to military zones face immediate suspicion, cordons, or raids, expanding state power dramatically. The Minneapolis abduction video illustrates how even accident victims become suspects, much like how Palestinians near checkpoints or protests are swept up en masse.

2. It Creates a “Papers Please” Culture: Demanding citizenship proof without cause humiliates and chills free movement, easily targeting those who “look different.” Palestinians endure this daily at over 100 checkpoints, where ID checks enforce segregation and control, weaponized against ethnicity and appearance…now imported to U.S. streets via shared tactics.

3. It Enables State-Sponsored Shaming: ICE’s database and outreach to employers or schools is government-backed doxxing, bypassing due process. Israel similarly publicizes “wanted” lists or uses media to expose Palestinians, destroying lives through stigma and retaliation, often without trial.

4. It Normalizes Racial Profiling: Questions like “How do I know you’re a U.S. citizen?” often hinge on looks, inviting discrimination. In Israel, profiling based on Arab features or accents is routine, fostering fear in Palestinian communities and now seeping into U.S. immigration enforcement via shared training. The video’s account of abduction after a staged accident highlights how profiling escalates to outright disappearances, a tactic refined in Gaza where AI and surveillance flag individuals for vanishing without trace.

These tactics, battle-tested in Gaza’s open-air prison, where AI surveillance and drone monitoring track every move, are now being adapted for U.S. borders through Israeli tech exports like Elbit Systems’ smart fences and NSO Group’s spyware.

The Human Costs

• Fear and Self-Censorship: People avoid protests or errands if proximity invites exposure or detention, stifling civic life. Palestinians in Gaza self-censor under constant surveillance, a model now chilling U.S. immigrant communities, as seen in the video where a simple drive turns into an abduction nightmare.

• Economic and Social Harm: Doxxing leads to job loss or stigma, often pre-trial. In Israel, administrative detentions ruin Palestinian livelihoods, with families targeted collectively—a tactic echoed in ICE’s employer contacts and disappearances that leave victims’ fates unknown.

• Erosion of Trust: Targeted groups withdraw from law enforcement cooperation, endangering all. Palestinian distrust of Israeli forces has made occupation zones volatile, a lesson unheeded as U.S. agencies adopt similar methods, including the cover-up abductions described in the Minneapolis incident.

• Risk of Abuse: Systems rewarding “fame” invite false reports and bias. Gaza’s “testing ground” has seen unchecked abuses, like AI-targeted strikes and arbitrary vanishings, now influencing ICE’s profiling tools and tactics that allow agents to “disappear” anyone they wish, bypassing accountability.

What This Would Mean for Basic Rights

This model blurs targeted probes into mass control, replacing suspicion with appearance or location. It hollows out protections against arbitrary stops, privacy invasions, and due process violations, rights Palestinians have been denied for generations under occupation.

The Minneapolis video exemplifies how ICE, inspired by Israeli methods, can orchestrate incidents to justify abductions, mirroring how the IDF “disappears” Palestinians through raids and detentions without oversight. If normalized in the U.S., it imports Israel’s framework of indefinite control, where Gaza’s siege tests limits of international tolerance before global export. The failure to stop Gaza’s devastation, through vetoes and arms flows, has eroded global norms, allowing these tactics to proliferate unchecked.

What Should Happen Next

• Immediate Transparency: Disclose ICE policies, databases, and IDF training details to reveal the full extent of these exchanges, including investigations into abduction incidents like the one in the video.

• Independent Oversight: Involve courts, inspectors, and rights groups to audit compliance, including reviews of Israeli-influenced programs and cases of enforced disappearances.

• Clear Limits and Safeguards: Mandate individualized suspicion, ban doxxing, and end joint trainings that import occupation tactics, while prohibiting vehicle rammings or abductions as cover-ups.

• Accountability for Misconduct: Probe officials promoting these models or with bias ties, and halt tech imports from firms complicit in Gaza abuses, ensuring victims of disappearances receive justice.

Plain Conclusion

ICE’s proposed enforcement…dragnet stops, citizenship demands, public shaming, and now abductions as seen in the Minneapolis video…is a direct import from Israel’s playbook against Palestinians, refined in Gaza’s laboratory of control and now boomeranging to U.S. soil.

Israel’s ability to “disappear” anyone through administrative detention and raids, without charges or trials, has been exported via trainings and tech, enabling ICE to grab individuals post-accident or otherwise to evade responsibility. By failing to intervene in Gaza, the world has spectacularly enabled this erosion of rights, normalizing violations that threaten democracies everywhere. If unchecked, this blueprint will erase constitutional safeguards for vulnerable communities, proving that unchecked power abroad inevitably returns home.