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. 

“Warrant procedures are ex parte—it’s the government going in and saying, ‘We need to do this,”’ said Moraff. “The defendant doesn’t have an opportunity to challenge that until they’re made aware of it, which is usually in a criminal case.”

When I told one of the protesters, Shauna Lowery, that I had reason to believe the FBI had extracted data from her phone, she was unsurprised. Her SIM card, she said, had been removed and taped to the back of her device. Bray-Waters told me she’d had similar suspicions after getting notifications about an attempt to access her iCloud account from Seattle, the site of the nearest FBI office. 

The FBI did not address specific questions about whether the agency obtained search warrants for the phone extractions in June. The US Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Washington, which brought the Spokane 9 case, also declined to comment, citing ongoing litigation.

One defense attorney involved in litigation, granted anonymity to speak candidly, said that law enforcement will sometimes take an “extract now, search later” approach, creating copies of phones, but waiting to search the data itself until a warrant is acquired.

But even that aspect of the extraction, said Moraff, the ACLU attorney, should still have been done pursuant to a warrant. “The Supreme Court recognized the vast quantity and sensitive quality of information on cell phones in 2014 when it held that a warrant is required to search a cell phone—even when a phone is seized incident to arrest,” she told me. “At the least, the FBI likely extracted all data that [a] user can access on the device. That’s a highly intrusive seizure, and it shouldn’t be done without a warrant.”

The FBI’s investigation came shortly after an internal directive from the Department of Justice ordering federal prosecutors to aggressively pursue and publicize cases against anti-ICE protesters. “There should be no bottleneck of referrals for complaints,” wrote Associate Deputy Attorney General Aakash Singh. “Push out press releases whenever you file charges in these matters.” That email went out June 12, 2025, the morning after the protest in Spokane, and the same week that mass demonstrations against ICE swept Los Angeles.

My colleague Sophie Hurwitz covered the Spokane case in May:

Videos from the day show brief scuffles—protesters and ICE agents pushing each other—but no evidence of serious injury to anyone. “None of the protesters were hurt. Fortunately, none of the law enforcement officers were hurt either,” Richard Barker, then the acting US Attorney for eastern Washington, told PBS in March. Yet local police arrested more than 30 people on the scene.

During DHS’ high-profile occupations of cities like Minneapolis, Barker and almost 100 other federal prosecutors came under severe Trump administration pressure to prosecute ICE protesters. It was an order Barker resigned rather than carry out. In that March interview, Barker told PBS he “didn’t feel in this case that a conspiracy charge that would carry a six-year term of incarceration was true to who I was or who I wanted to be as a federal prosecutor.”

Public records show that the same day the DOJ memo went out, FBI agent C. Parker called the Spokane police and “requested that any cellular devices [in the department’s] custody would be processed by the FBI.” The next morning, officers met with Parker and Special Agent Loader to transfer custody of the 23 phones.

“That process was unbeknownst to me or my executive leadership team, and when we found out about it, it caused a little bit of consternation,” Spokane Police Chief Kevin Hall told me. “From my standpoint, as a relatively new chief here at that time, this was unusual that line-level staff detectives would make the decision to go ahead and transfer phones or evidence to a federal partner without running that up the chain and making sure it didn’t impact the local investigation.”

Hall added that, after learning some evidence had been transferred to the FBI, the department “hit pause for a couple of days while we figured out exactly why that was occurring, and at whose behest.”  But public records show it was too late for the protesters’ phones: “I was also asked if evidence seized as a part of the investigation, namely cell phones, had been already turned over,” an officer named Zachary Storment writes in a police report. “This had in fact already been done.”

Another report by Officer Nick Geren states a lieutenant called him at home on the afternoon of June 13 and ordered him “not to release any further evidence to the FBI.” 

“I advised that we only had one item remaining in our lab area, a laptop that had also been seized during the arrests,” Geren wrote. 

Hall told me that, after conversations with the FBI and his legal team, he determined that the FBI should provide the Spokane Police Department with a subpoena to take custody of the devices. That subpoena was provided late in the day on June 13, Hall said, after the phones had already been transferred over. Hall said the subpoena authorized only the seizure of the devices and did not include information about a search warrant.

By June 20, nearly all of the protesters’ misdemeanor charges had been dismissed, and the FBI returned the phones and storage device containing extractions to the Spokane PD. At the time, the FBI advised that two of the phones not on the extraction list should continue to have their WiFi and cell signals blocked. Cooper Quintin, senior staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said that such a step is usually associated with ongoing investigations. “Making sure a phone doesn’t have a data connection is a best practice before forensic extraction,” he said. 

Nearly one month after the protest, on July 9, a federal grand jury indicted the Spokane 9 on felony conspiracy charges. Thalia Ramirez, Ben Stuckart, and four others took plea deals. The remaining three defendants—the “Spokane 3”— were convicted last month by a jury in a major, largely unexpected victory for President Trump’s war on dissent.

Justice Forral, one of the Spokane 3, also had their phone seized upon arrest in June. Forral’s device was not included in the list of extractions reviewed by Mother Jones, but their device was uniquely flagged in police documents as “out to external agency for investigation.” An extraction from their phone was eventually included as an exhibit in the Spokane 3 trial.

Court documents show that the government listed Loader, the FBI agent who obtained the cell phones from the Spokane PD, as an expert witness in that trial. 

“Loader will testify that he took custody of Defendants’ phones, used the forensic tools of Cellebrite and Greykey [sic] to retrieve data off of the phones, and provided that data to case agents,” prosecutors wrote.

Since the protest last year, Hall said the Spokane PD has “made some progress in leveling expectations, so that folks on the investigative side, as well as folks on the tactical side … know where I stand on how we address these types of incidents.” He added that his department has created a “dialogue policing unit, where you inject officers into the crowd just to have conversations, build rapport, and help facilitate First Amendment protected activities.”

It’s not uncommon for the FBI and other federal agencies to take extractions from cell phones in criminal investigations. “What I think is really new and really concerning, from a privacy and civil liberties perspective, is their use in cases that are directly related to free speech and association rights,” Bowman, of the Center for Democracy and Technology, said.

Indeed, some of the phone evidence presented at the Spokane 3 trial included benign political expression.One FBI agent testified that messages on defendant Bajun Mavawalla II’s phone showed he’d discussed the June 11 protest on Reddit—but admitted that the messages didn’t evince any criminal activity. Another agent highlighted that defendant Jac Archer had sent fellow defendant and former city councilor Ben Stuckart’s Facebook post calling for the initial protest in Signal chats. (Stuckart took a plea deal in December.)

“This is one of the first pages in the authoritarian’s playbook,” said Bowman. “Identify the people who disagree with you by surveilling their free speech and association rights, and then conduct further surveillance to intimidate or suppress their speech.”

Bowman and Moraff pointed to the lack of guardrails governing the government’s use and retention of data from phone extractions—and the potential for that data to be resurfaced by police in future investigations. 

“We think police departments should be a lot more transparent about these retention policies, and should have restrictions on how long they can retain the data, especially after a case is closed or they decide not to bring charges,” said Moraff. “When an extraction is performed on a device, that’s obviously way more data than there was ever probable cause to seize. So even if we assume that the FBI followed all warrant procedures and sought a warrant within a reasonable amount of time, and then got a warrant that was limited to a search just for the information that there was probable cause to search for—even if they follow all those steps, then we still have this issue of what happens to the extraction.” (The FBI did not answer a question about its data retention policies. Federal law on the matter is not well established.)

The Spokane 3 now face up to six years in prison. As their attorneys appeal the verdict, the Trump administration has continued to pursue aggressive federal conspiracy charges against protesters across the country. Some of the government’s cases have collapsed spectacularly. But the FBI’s Spokane investigation highlights just how easy it is for protesters to become unwittingly swept up in a much larger network of state surveillance and secrecy, regardless of whether they’ve been charged with a crime. 

“This creates enormous distrust in government, and can have severe chilling effects on First Amendment–protected activity like protesting,” said Bowman. “People might be less likely to engage in protest activity if they think that there’s a chance that someday the FBI might take their data and spy on them with it.”

In Feburary, Joswar Slater Rodriguez Torres, one of the young men whose detention sparked the initial protest, was released on parole. A judge found his constitutional rights had been violated.