People over Papers, a crowd-sourcing project that maps sightings of immigration agents, was taken offline yesterday by Padlet, the collaborative bulletin board platform on which it was built. It’s just the latest ICE-tracking initiative to be pulled by tech platforms in the past few days. A Padlet customer service representative told Celeste, one of the project’s creators, that the map “was trashed due to violations of our Content Policy,” without specifying which policy was violated. Celeste has not disclosed her last name for safety reasons. But days earlier, right-wing influencer Laura Loomer tweeted at Padlet’s CEO about the project. “Are you aware that @padlet is being used by radical left wing domestic terrorists, illegal aliens and their supporters to obstruct law enforcement operations and harass ICE agents?” she wrote, “PADLET’s Content Policy clearly notes that harassment, stalking, privacy violations, inciting violence, and any other unlawful activity are not on the platform.” In the same thread, Loomer claimed responsibility for the removal of several similar apps, including ICEBlock, from Apple and Google’s app stores last week. Loomer’s remarks echo statements made by DHS and DOJ officials which claim that ICE-tracking projects are responsible for a “1000%” increase in assaults on ICE agents, including shootings at ICE facilities in Texas in July that injured two ICE agents, as well as people leaving trash at ICE agents’ homes in protest. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem has described “violence” against ICE agents as “anything that threatens them and their safety, so it is doxing them, it’s videotaping them where they’re at when they’re out on operations,” while DHS assistant secretary for public affairs Tricia McLaughlin has indicated that the department “will prosecute those who illegally harass ICE agents to the fullest extent of the law.”Padlet did not respond to MIT Technology Review’s request for comment on why they took the People over Papers project down.However, Celeste told us she rejects Loomer’s claims. “Nothing we are doing is unlawful and we will continue exercising our right to freedom of speech,” she said. “We do not condone any violence whatsoever.”Transparency, or doxxing? Celeste started People over Papers in January, after connecting with other TikTok creators who were also sharing information about ICE raids in their communities. In the ten months since, it has received over 19 million unique visitors, and has been averaging between 200,000-300,000 users per day. She came up with the idea of mapping the raids “to inform people of what is happening in their communities” and also “documenting history and gathering information about something that will likely be looked back on as an extremely dark time.”Her project is among a number of volunteer-led efforts, including the ICEBlock app that was removed from app stores last week and the Stop ICE Raids Alert Network, that map anonymous reports on immigration enforcement agents conducting raids. The maps play an important role in “offer[ing] protection, solidarity, and survival strategies in hostile territory,” Alissa Richardson, a scholar at the University of Southern California that studies how marginalized communities use social media, told MIT Technology Review this summer. They serve as “modern-day Green Books for immigrant communities. Just as Black travelers once used the Green Book to navigate safely through a landscape of racial terror, these digital tools help Latine families move through spaces marked by surveillance and risk,” she said. Pressuring technology platforms to remove the maps is just one part of the administration’s strategy to stop efforts to track ICE or identify its masked agents conducting raids. In early September, the Department of Homeland Security subpoenaed Meta for Stop ICE Raids Alert Network’s Instagram account, as well as about a number of other non-profit organizations and rapid response networks; the subpoena has been temporarily blocked pending a court hearing. At least one person has allegedly lost their job in connection to these apps. Carolyn Feinstein, whose husband ran the ICEBlock app, was terminated from her job with the Department of Justice over the summer, which she says was in retaliation for her husband’s work. “Trying to blunt these efforts to hold federal officers accountable” has the effect of “chilling speech and activism,” says David Greene, the director of civil liberties at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He says that identifying agents does not count as doxxing, because “the idea that law enforcement would be masked and and therefore unaccountable to the people they are serving is really anathema to American values.” “Saying the doxing itself is an act of violence would require a different definition of violence than the one we’ve traditionally used in regards to legal issues,” says Peter Simi, a sociology professor at Chapman University who studies threats to public officials. For its part, the People over Papers map was back online six hours after it was removed from Padlet—and this time, on its own website, which Celeste’s team has been working on since May and had planned to launch next week. Celeste says she isn’t cowed. “I am personally super stubborn. The more someone tells me I can’t do something, the more I want to do it.” Besides, “if this information isn’t posted on our platform, it will be posted on Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok and any other social media platform,” she says. “People will continue to inform each other one way or another.”