SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
This week, the Department of Homeland Security was accused of deliberately slowing down hundreds of thousands of immigrant visa applications for people from 75 countries in defiance of a federal court order. And protests hit a sleepy Vermont town that's a hub for ICE intelligence gathering. NPR's Vanessa Romo joins us now for the latest immigration briefing, a regular look at the administration's crackdown. Vanessa, thanks for being with us.
VANESSA ROMO, BYLINE: Hi, Scott. Thanks for having me.
SIMON: And let's begin with that last story. You've been reporting on this - ICE surveillance headquarters in Vermont. What did you find? What does ICE do there?
ROMO: ICE has three targeting surveillance centers in the country. One is in California, and the other two are in this very beautiful, quiet town of 10,000 people in Williston, Vermont, just outside of Burlington. I was there when a group of protesters was holding a demonstration outside of what's called the Law Enforcement Support Center. ICE describes this as a single national point of contact for law enforcement around the country. And here's Leif Taranta, one of the protest organizers, describing some of the work that goes on there.
LEIF TARANTA: This is the only ICE tip line in the country. So when people call to report someone they think might be undocumented, those calls go here, and then the people here coordinate with ICE agents about going to pick up people. And so they do a lot of the dispatching for ICE nationally from here.
ROMO: So you know how the Trump administration has consistently said that the ICE sweeps that we're seeing around the country are deliberate and that officers have specific targets in mind when they're deployed? Well, this is where those lists are coming from.
SIMON: What do we know about what information law enforcement officers might be using to put those lists together?
ROMO: Well, this law enforcement center is also home to ICE's massive database of a hundred million electronic records. So that includes immigrant status information, court and law enforcement records and even biometric data. And so analysts there pull from all of that information to create those target lists.
SIMON: You said Williston's home to two of these surveillance headquarters. Please tell us about the second.
ROMO: The second is just about a mile and a half away. It's called the National Criminal Analysis and Targeting Center. And the work going on here is of really great concern to privacy rights advocates who say that DHS is pulling information from commercial databases and social media. So everything from Google to Instagram, WhatsApp and even YouTube.
And based on a federal contract proposal, they allege that the Trump administration is now scouring the internet for what's called sentiment analysis to create these profiles on people who might be expressing anti-ICE views. Here's Kabbas Azhar, a lawyer with the Electronic Privacy Information Center.
KABBAS AZHAR: Of course, there's a lot of issues with that. Speech is very ambiguous, very contextual. And oftentimes, this threat analysis that they're doing can sweep in a lot of protected First Amendment activity.
ROMO: So we asked ICE about whether they're doing that, and they did not respond to my questions.
SIMON: And I gather this small town in Vermont has become the scene of regular demonstrations. What do the protesters hope to achieve?
ROMO: They hope to draw attention to the fact that these intelligence facilities are here and that they're at the heart of the Trump administration's aggressive immigration crackdown. So the thought is that if more people in a very blue, progressive state knew, then that would spark public outrage and that could lead to their ouster.
SIMON: And now, Vanessa, the other topic that we mentioned earlier. Two months ago, federal judge struck down a blanket Trump administration pause on issuing immigrant visas to people from 75 countries. Is the State Department complying with that order?
ROMO: Lawyers say no. My colleague Sergio Martínez-Beltrán spoke with immigration attorneys and people affected by this policy who say not only is the State Department not following the judges' directives, but it's intentionally slow-walking the processing of nearly 300,000 visas from people from those previously banned nations. That has, in effect, left all of those applicants, who are largely spouses and children or other family members of U.S. citizens, trapped in their home country.
And again, we reached out to the State Department, and citing pending litigation, they declined to comment on that charge that they're foot-dragging reviewing these visas. The agency did pause visa processing worldwide to conduct a training program for consular officials. And in an email statement to NPR, they said that the goal of the training is to identify immigrants who could become a burden on taxpayers, a so-called public charge.
SIMON: NPR's Vanessa Romo with this week's immigration briefing. Vanessa, thanks so much.
ROMO: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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