In September 2024, Amandla Thomas-Johnson was a Ph.D. candidate studying in the U.S. on a student visa when he briefly attended a pro-Palestinian protest. In April 2025, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) sent Google an administrative subpoena requesting his data. The next month, Google gave Thomas-Johnson’s information to ICE without giving him the chance to challenge the subpoena, breaking a nearly decade-long promise to notify users before handing their data to law enforcement.
Today, the Electronic Frontier Foundation sent complaints to the California and New York Attorneys General asking them to investigate Google for deceptive trade practices for breaking that promise. You can read about the complaints here. Below is Thomas-Johnson’s account of his ordeal.
Out of touch but not out of reach
I thought my ordeal with U.S. immigration authorities was over a year ago, when I left the country, crossing into Canada at Niagara Falls.
By that point, the Trump administration had effectively turned federal power against international students like me. After I attended a pro-Palestine protest at Cornell University—for all of five minutes—the administration’s rhetoric about cracking down on students protesting what we saw as genocide forced me into hiding for three months. Federal agents came to my home looking for me. A friend was detained at an airport in Tampa and interrogated about my whereabouts.
I’m currently a Ph.D. student. Before that, I was a reporter. I’m a dual British and Trinadad and Tobago citizen. I have not been accused of any crime.
I believed that once I left U.S. territory, I had also left the reach of its authorities. I was wrong.
The email
Weeks later, in Geneva, Switzerland, I received what looked like a routine email from Google. It informed me that the company had already handed over my account data to the Department of Homeland Security.
At first, I wasn’t alarmed. I had seen something similar before. An associate of mine, Momodou Taal, had received advance notice from Google and Facebook that his data had been requested. He was given advanced notice of the subpoenas, and law enforcement eventually withdrew them before the companies turned over his data.
Google had already disclosed my data without telling me.
I assumed I would be given the same opportunity. But the language in my email was different. It was final: “Google has received and responded to legal process from a law enforcement authority compelling the release of information related to your Google Account.”
Google had already disclosed my data without telling me. There was no opportunity to contest it.
Google’s broken promise
To be clear, this should not have happened this way. Google promises that it will notify users before their data is handed over in response to legal processes, including administrative subpoenas. That notice is meant to provide a chance to challenge the request. In my case, that safeguard was bypassed. My data was handed over without warning—at the request of an administration targeting students engaged in protected political speech.
Months later, my lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation obtained the subpoena itself. On paper, the request focused largely on subscriber information: IP addresses, physical address, other identifiers, and session times and durations.
But taken together, these fragments form something far more powerful—a detailed surveillance profile. IP logs can be used to approximate location. Physical addresses show where you sleep. Session times would show when you were communicating with friends or family. Even without message content, the picture that emerges is intimate and invasive.
State power meets private data
What this experience has made clear is that anyone can be targeted by law enforcement. And with their massive stores of data, technology companies can facilitate those arbitrary investigations. Together, they can combine state power, corporate data, and algorithmic inference in ways that are difficult to see—and even harder to challenge.
The consequences of what happened to me are not abstract. I left the United States. But I do not feel that I have left its reach. Being investigated by the federal government is intimidating. Questions run through your head. Am I now a marked individual? Will I face heightened scrutiny if I continue my reporting? Can I travel safely to see family in the Caribbean?
Who, exactly, can I hold accountable?
