Skill Level: Intermediate Resister
What This Tool Is
This guide teaches you how to fight back when the government starts repurposing public-service agencies — like the VA, the CDC, DHS, or even local health departments — into surveillance arms. Today we learned the VA is building a secret immigration-status database on its own workers, potentially sharing it with ICE. This is not “vetting.” This is authoritarian infrastructure. Once built, it never goes away.
Your tool today:
Organized Resistance to Surveillance Creep — the tactics every modern resister needs to protect people targeted by political databases, racialized tracking programs, and weaponized bureaucracy.
Why This Tool Matters
Surveillance is always rolled out under the guise of “safety,” “efficiency,” or “national security.” But historically, it’s used to target dissidents, immigrants, whistleblowers, and anyone the regime finds inconvenient. When a government creates a database of workers based on immigration status, it’s not gathering information — it’s rehearsing persecution. Stopping surveillance early prevents it from becoming normalized, automated, and unstoppable. Once these systems mature, they expand at light speed — ask anyone who lived through PATRIOT Act creep, COINTELPRO, or ICE fusion centers. Protecting targeted communities (immigrants, veterans, medical workers, trans people, protesters) starts with disrupting the data pipeline.
How to Use This Tool
1. Identify the Surveillance Point
- Find out who is being tracked, by whom, and what data is being collected.
- For the VA scandal: the agency wants immigration status, employment roles, and personal identifiers on non-citizen workers — including doctors, techs, and janitors.
2. Warn the Affected Community
- Reach out to unions, worker coalitions, immigration lawyers, whistleblower protection orgs, and VA employee networks.
- People can’t resist a trap they don’t know they’re in.
3. Demand Oversight Immediately
- Contact your House and Senate reps with a simple message: “Public agencies are not ICE. Launch an oversight inquiry.”
- Use call scripts from immigrant-justice orgs.
- Push for hearings and subpoenas before the database becomes operational.
- File FOIA requests at both federal and state levels: policy memos, draft database designs, vendor contracts, ICE communications, legal justifications.
- Sunlight slows authoritarian creep.
- Journalists love a document trail.
- Hand them any memos, emails, screenshots, or whistleblower statements you can collect.
- Coverage forces the agency to defend itself — and often backpedal.
- Create encrypted chat groups for affected workers.
- Get Know-Your-Rights materials flowing.
- Coordinate with local immigration attorneys for rapid-response if ICE involvement escalates.
7. Track the Expansion Attempts
- Once one agency builds a database, others copy it.
- Stay alert for similar moves in HHS, Labor, DHS, and federal contractors.
- Kill the pilot program before it becomes the national standard.
8. Mobilize Public Outrage
- Create shareable graphics, infographics, and Kitty memes that spell out: “Your taxpayer-funded VA is building a deportation pipeline.”
- Public anger is kryptonite to quiet authoritarian projects.
Example of This Tool in Action
In 2017, activists noticed ICE fusion centers copying local DMV data to identify undocumented immigrants. Fast response — lawsuits, FOIAs, media pressure, and local resistance — forced several states to shut access down. Surveillance thrives in silence. It dies in the spotlight. Be the spotlight!