You are on a public sidewalk with your phone up, watching federal agents move a person into a van. You stay on the pavement. You do not touch anyone. You tell yourself the recording is the accountability.
Homeland Security Investigations was already building a file that starts with your face.
In federal court records from Minnesota, HSI ran Clearview AI against people tied to immigration protests and observation. The government produced at least two Clearview search reports in the case against Isaac Sant. One of those returns, accepted as matches to Sant, included Facebook photographs of another man, his pregnant wife, and their young daughter. Those images are now linked to Sant inside HSI's databases.
The Search That Swallows a Family Album
If you film ICE from a curb, the risk does not stop at a ticket or a shove.
Clearview scrapes faces from the public internet. HSI feeds a photo into that pile. The software returns possible matches scraped from news sites, social media, and anything else it already swallowed. In Sant's file, agents accepted results that were not him. Page eight of that Clearview packet pulls another man's Facebook life into a federal intelligence record, spouse and child included.
A sidewalk observer gets identified, and the face search can drag a private family album into the same investigative stack that already holds vehicle records and social media.
Sant is one of fifteen people federal prosecutors charged with conspiring to impede immigration officers during Operation Metro Surge. His defense team forced the paper into daylight. The exhibits put the face tool inside the investigative work itself.
What Else Went Into the File
The Clearview hits sat inside a larger Minnesota campaign. On January 28, 2026, HSI opened Operation Puppet Master and authorized undercover personnel to penetrate groups the agency believed might threaten federal officers. In February it opened Project Whipple Shield to map organizational structures and money behind activity it associated with interference against federal operations.
Undercover agents went into community meetings at churches and union halls. They recorded people at libraries and parks. They entered private Signal threads. One agent used the handle peanutbutterjelly. At a Sunrise Movement meeting where participants described planned demonstrations as peaceful, an undercover agent told someone he had construction skills, could build things useful for more aggressive direct action, and was willing to risk arrest. The activists did not take the bait. The surveillance kept going.
At Prince of Peace Lutheran Church, agents logged license plates from attendees' cars, ran the registrations, and built intelligence workups with photographs and biographical detail. They monitored Whipple Watch, a group that documents vehicles entering and leaving the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building. They reached into financial records involving the Service Employees International Union and the Communications Workers of America, chasing wire transfers, PAC spending, and payment-service transactions.
That stack is how a face on a sidewalk becomes one field in a thicker dossier.
They Greeted Her by Name
Legal observer Nicole Cleland said she was following immigration vehicles at a safe distance when a Border Patrol agent walked up to her car window, greeted her by name, and told her he had facial recognition running with his body camera. Three days later her Global Entry and TSA PreCheck were revoked. She has sued. She calls it retaliation for protected observation. DHS disputes any policy of tracking and punishing lawful observers, and the public record has not shown which system, if any, connected that roadside greeting to the trusted-traveler cut.
An observer who never gave her name got called by it. Days later a travel privilege she had held for years was gone. I do not need a flowchart to read that sequence. That is what officer safety looks like when the target is a person with a phone on a public street.
The Rulebook With the Trapdoor
Federal officials will tell you they only identify threats. They will point at policy paper.
Read the paper. In November 2024, ICE published a privacy assessment on how HSI uses publicly available and social media information. It says searches should have a nexus to authorized law enforcement activity. It says First Amendment activity is not supposed to be collected and retained for its own sake. Online information is supposed to be corroborated the ordinary way.
Then the assessment excludes undercover operations. Those sit under separate guidelines. Put an undercover code name on the file and the published restraints do not apply to that work. Clearview becomes another feed into a stack the Privacy Act was supposed to cabin. A face on a sidewalk can still open a search that returns a stranger's spouse and child.
Once an agency builds that apparatus, it does not unbolt it because you were peaceful on a Tuesday. Sant's lawyers are asking for every Clearview report generated on protesters and activists during Metro Surge. That request alone tells you how little of the biometric layer has been shown.
If you stand on a sidewalk to watch ICE, understand the exchange before you lift the phone. Your recording may never matter as much as the search that starts with your face. When that search runs, the file can grow past you. Family photographs scraped off the open web can ride back into a federal record built from plates, meetings, and face search.
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