Public Records Show FBI Secretly Extracted Data From ICE Protesters' Phones
Previously unreported documents reveal “extractions” from at least 13 devices after a Washington state protest last June.
The agency used software from Israeli firm Cellebrite to extract protesters'
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 cellphone, 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.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2026/06/cellebrite-phone-protest-ice-dhs-spokane-fbi-conspiracy-surveillance-privacy/