Public Records Show FBI Secretly Extracted Data From ICE Protesters’ Phones |
On the evening of June 11, 2025, Shailynn Bray-Waters joined hundreds of other protesters at a demonstration outside an ICE field office in Spokane, Washington. She’d learned through social media that two of her former ESL students—Cesar Alexander Alvarez Perez and Joswar Slater Rodriguez Torres, both lawful asylum seekers from Venezuela—had been detained during a routine immigration check-in. Former Spokane city council president Ben Stuckart, who was sponsoring Alvarez Perez through a government humanitarian program, put out a call to action on Facebook: “I am going to sit in front of the bus. Feel free to join me.”
Bray-Waters did not sit in front of the ICE transport van. Nevertheless, public records show the Spokane police arrested her that night on a misdemeanor “failure to disperse” charge, confiscated her cell phone, and sent it over to the FBI for investigation.
Bray-Waters was one of 23 people whose phones were seized during a mass arrest that night. She wouldn’t see her device again until mid-August. On June 20, Spokane news outlet RANGE detailed the confusion swirling around the seized devices with the headline: “Where are the protesters’ phones?”
Now, an investigation by Mother Jones confirms that the FBI used software from the Israeli firm Cellebrite to secretly extract data from the phones of Bray-Waters and at least a dozen other protesters. A month later, one of those protesters, Thalia Ramirez, would be indicted as part of the Spokane 9 case, in which the federal government charged nine people with “conspiracy to impede or injure” officers at the June 11 protest. Every other protester whose phone was extracted in June had their misdemeanor charges promptly dismissed in city and county courts.
“This sounds like a case in which the government basically had a blank check to hoover up everyone’s data,” said Tom Bowman, policy counsel at the Security and Surveillance Project of the Center for Democracy and Technology, a nonprofit that advocates for digital privacy. The extractions, Bowman said, underscore the danger of sweeping conspiracy charges: “Your mere proximity to somebody else can be used to justify an invasive search into your entire digital life.”
I reviewed hundreds of pages of Spokane police reports from the June 11 protest, obtained via a public records request and shared with Mother Jones. One document, a “Property and Evidence Case Jacket” from the City of Spokane, lists numerous phones and personal items seized from protesters, as well as an envelope provided by FBI Special Agent Kevin Loader containing a storage drive with digital extractions from 13 devices. I cross-referenced the numbers assigned to those devices with phone triage forms and other documents in the public records dump to confirm the phones’ owners.
“If someone calls about their phone, inform them it is still being held for investigative purposes,” states a June 13 entry at the top of the evidence case jacket. “Do not send them to the FBI or inform them the phone is with the FBI.”
The FBI needed search warrants to extract data from the devices in June, according to Laura Moraff, staff attorney at the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project. But it’s difficult to determine whether those warrants were obtained and what they said. The government is not required to notify people if their devices have been searched in an investigation—that information is normally only revealed through the discovery process in court. But 12 of the 13 protesters whose phones were extracted were never indicted.........