A screaming 16-year-old girl in Worcester, Massachusetts struggles in the arms of two police officers. It is May 9, 2025 and her frantic, unintelligible screams pierce the morning air, as more officers gather around her, grabbing her kicking limbs in an attempt to contain her before pressing her face into the ground. A crowd of neighbors circle around the fray, yelling at them to stop. One woman dumps what appears to be water on an officer, before being shoved back. Another, a baby cradled in her arms, yells “Why are you letting this happen?” For days after the incident, there was uproar. Updates from NBC News and Nueva Inglaterra revealed the girl and a bystander were both arrested, and a city council member was charged with assault and battery on a police officer. Worcester Mayor Joseph Petty released a statement, calling the incident disturbing and something that should not “happen in our community.”
What the cameras didn’t capture was the girl seeing her family taken away by federal immigration officers, holding that same baby while the infant’s mother and others were packed into the vehicle. The video didn’t capture her running after the car, kicking it and begging it to stop until police grabbed her. Many of the clips were less than two minutes long. But even a few seconds captured the harsh reality: millions of people saw one of the worst moments of this young girl’s life — and they didn’t even know her name. Her story was important for the nation to know — but sharing it on social media highlighted one of the strongest conundrums of our digital age. People want to turn the government’s surveillance state back on itself — but how do they do that and keep their neighbors safe in the process?
There’s no chronicle of 2025 that doesn’t include the wave of arrests by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents. Since President Donald Trump‘s mass deportations began, over 220,000 people have been arrested, according to NBC. Over 75,000 of those detainees had no criminal record, according to Berkeley’s Deportation Data Project, and only a small percentage had violent convictions, with a large majority of records relating to traffic violations.
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This immigration crackdown could not have been accomplished without America’s web of surveillance tools, illustrating the ironic nature of surveillance states: Once these systems exist, you can’t control how they’re used. The biggest and most memorable snapshots from this year will undoubtedly be of ICE raids, as people continue to plaster platforms with videos of screaming families being torn apart by masked federal agents, ripped out of their vehicles and homes while people stand by helpless to do anything but record. Like passenger-seat recordings of police brutality that helped launch the Black Lives Matter movement, the videos of ICE arrests are a dominant example of U.S. citizens trying to use the tools of the surveillance state in their favor — or at least in the favor of public good. But in trying to document the Trump administration’s atrocities, people are normalizing the very system that threatens America’s undocumented population in the first place.
The public nature of these ICE raids isn’t just inescapable — it’s stoking public discontent over the Trump administration’s policies. In June, after weeks of raids across the nation, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt called the crowds of people recording and publicly interfering with them “violent mobs” — announcing the deployment of the National Guard in cities like Washington, D.C., Chicago, Los Angeles, and Portland. In September, California became the first state to ban masked officers. Sen. Scott Wiener, who introduced the bill, cited the social media videos of arrests in his reasoning, saying it’s “terrifying to see ICE agents and other federal agents running around with these ski masks … You can’t tell who they are … and they’re just grabbing people and putting them in the unmarked cars.” And it’s not just cellphone videos. In the past three months, footage from Ring cameras and other home-security software have captured ICE raids. In almost all of these instances, social media users have praised the existence of these cameras, even encouraging others to install them as a way to keep their neighborhoods safe. But what these viral videos don’t examine is how an underlying trust in systems of the surveillance state, even when they’re used against government overreach, are still investments in the system itself. And one of the most difficult aspects of an active surveillance state is navigating the information about ourselves — and our neighbors — that we give up of our own free will.
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There’s a clear reason why people record ICE arrests. The smartphone has become an extension of people’s bodies; it is an ever present tool, one that is used for everything from entertainment to communication to protection. It’s no wonder that in situations where people are desperately searching for agency — like when masked federal officers act with impunity against people screaming for help — filming can feel like the only possible action. Families of people detained by ICE have even said publicly how helpful bystander footage has been in identifying when and where their loved ones were taken, or proving ICE officers or nearby police acted with aggressive force. The most widely shared videos of ICE operations are POV shots from cell phones, directly positioning ICE agents as unwieldy aggressors. These videos, which are often posted from multiple angles, feel like direct action. The government can put out statement after statement about arrests, but even demonizing PR language can’t withstand the power of a video that contradicts their version of events.
But putting feelings aside, what’s left is an unintentional reliance — and in many cases, investment — right back into the surveillance state. In the case of Ring cameras, which many people have suggested would protect neighborhoods from ICE aggressiveness, the Amazon-owned home security doorbells have had a partnership with Flock Safety since October 2025. (Flock gives law enforcement access to footage from their automatic license plate programs.) A May 2025 report from 404 Media found that ICE was using Flock without a formal contract for immigration investigations, searches that help the government build a case against undocumented individuals. (Flock did not respond directly to the article, but announced in June that it would prevent national agencies from searching footage in three states.) And in October, Wired reported that ICE is actively working to build out a surveillance network that uses public social media photos, videos, and metadata to flag anti U.S. speech for immigration considerations.
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While many of the most well known ICE raids focus on undocumented communities, the recent mass arrests have clouded a continuing problem — the Trump administration targeting people for deportation and immigration status changes based on their public views. Columbia activist Mahmoud Khalil is still in the process of fighting deportation efforts because of his participation in pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University. Mohsen Mahdawi and Rümeysa Öztürk, two students detained for pro-Palestinian activism have been released from detention centers but still have active immigration proceedings taking place in court. These cases have been characterized by their judicial victories, with each of the three students freed from detention by judges, but their cases are still ongoing. It’s not a stretch to imagine a world where the same administration that attempted to deport students over political beliefs — and in Öztürk’s case, a simple op-ed — might target the people getting in between ICE officers and their next victims. Posting videos of ICE raids, especially those where protestors and deterrers have their faces fully visible, raises awareness. But it also exposes people to the same surveillance state that the Trump administration has already proven willing to use in deportation cases.
This is the contradictory reality of the surveillance state. Recording ICE detentions makes sure federal overreaches don’t happen in the dark — but posting them online also creates a public, searchable database to identify Americans who express anti-ICE sentiments. As individual citizens, we can’t take back what’s already out there. But people protest and argue and record during ICE detentions because what people really want are witnesses. And if witnessing, that acknowledgement that those being arrested and targeted aren’t suffering in silence, is the intended purpose — then the most important work will happen in the next weeks, months, and years. Not just in spreading the latest viral arrest video, but making sure that people from the first ones you ever saw are remembered. The defining images of 2025 will be the ICE raids. Our job is making sure these arresting pictures, these horrible sights, don’t become just another thing to swipe away.
Photographs in Illustration
David McNew/Getty Images; Mathieu Lewis-Rolland/Getty Images, 2; Jamie Kelter Davis/Getty Images; Adobe Stock
