In July 2025, a senior ICE official testified under oath in federal court that his agency used a private, anonymous, Israel-linked doxing website to build deportation cases against thousands of American students. The website is Canary Mission. It was never authorized by Congress. It is run from a padlocked building in Israel. Its funders break the law to hide their identities. And it has been operating on American campuses for a decade.
Canary Mission is an anonymous doxing website established in 2014. It publishes the names, photographs, employment histories, and social media activity of students, professors, and organizations it characterizes as "anti-Israel or antisemitic." Its profiles appear at the top of Google search results — deliberately, as a career-destruction mechanism. According to the site's own internal planning documents, obtained by Drop Site News, one of its stated goals is "Anonymity as a tool to scare the enemy."
The site is run through an Israeli nonprofit called Megamot Shalom, owned by British-born Israeli Jonathan Bash. It operates out of a padlocked building in Israel. Its funders are anonymous. Its doxxers use fake social media accounts. It employs over 30 people. As of 2025, it had published profiles on over 5,000 individuals, and its stated production target for 2025 was 150 new profiles per week.
Canary Mission does not document violence. It documents dissent. Here is how a typical profile is built — and what actually appears in the dossiers that ended up in ICE's files:
| What the person did | How Canary Mission describes it | What happened |
|---|---|---|
| Co-authored an op-ed in a student newspaper asking the university to "meaningfully engage with" a divestment resolution | "Engaged in anti-Israel activism" | Rümeysa Öztürk, Tufts PhD student, detained for 6 weeks. No charges filed. |
| Organized student protests at Columbia University | "Promoted Hamas propaganda" / "antisemitic rhetoric" | Mahmoud Khalil, Columbia student, detained 100+ days. No charges filed. Filed a $20M lawsuit against the Trump administration. |
| Tweeted a selfie at a campus encampment | "Supported a pro-Hamas encampment" | Nathan Kalman-Lamb, Canadian academic, subjected to hours of US border interrogation and searched item by item |
| Attended an antiwar protest | "Participated in a pro-Hamas rally" | Profile created; shown to potential employers; career impact documented by The Intercept |
| Was in a club that co-signed a pro-Gaza letter | "Association with organizations that support terrorism" | Listed at Harvard, UPenn, and other universities; profiles appear in Google top results for these students |
According to W. J. T. Mitchell, a University of Chicago professor with a Canary Mission profile: prospective employers see Canary Mission profiles appear at the top of Google search results for students and recent alumni who do not have a "very deep set of achievements." The Intercept interviewed multiple professors who were fired or faced disciplinary action from their universities, finding that Canary Mission profiles played a role. The accusation requires no evidence. There is no appeal process. The accused has no ability to respond. The accuser is anonymous.
Canary Mission is not just a private website. It is, in the words of investigative journalist James Bamford writing in The Nation, "a key intelligence asset for Israel's Ministry of Strategic Affairs and the Shin Bet security service." The Ministry of Strategic Affairs is a highly secretive Israeli intelligence organization "largely focused on the United States," tasked with countering the BDS movement and pro-Palestinian activism globally.
On July 9, 2025, in a federal courtroom in Boston — during a trial over a Harvard faculty group's lawsuit challenging the Trump administration's ideological deportation policy — ICE official Peter Hatch testified under oath that:
In early March 2025, Hatch formed a "tiger team" of analysts and was given a list of students to investigate. "Most" of the names came from Canary Mission. The team produced between 100 and 200 individual reports on students, which were then sent to the State Department. Secretary of State Rubio later cited one of these reports — on Mahmoud Khalil — as grounds for his arrest, saying his participation in protests was "detrimental to U.S. foreign policy interests."
Hatch also testified that his team used Canary Mission's list "without a firm understanding of the methodology through which individuals came to be included" — meaning ICE was acting on a private, anonymous, foreign-linked blacklist without verifying how names ended up on it, or why.
CNN: "Canary Mission was the most inclusive." — Hatch's own words, under oath, describing why his team relied on it.
This testimony matters beyond the individual trial. It confirmed what advocates had long argued: the Trump administration was not independently investigating pro-Palestinian students for crimes. It was outsourcing the investigation to an anonymous, Israel-linked website — and then using that website's output as the basis for federal law enforcement action. No criminal charges were filed against any of the prominent students detained.
The Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) requires anyone acting as an agent of a foreign government in the United States to publicly disclose that relationship. It was passed in 1938 to counter pro-Nazi propaganda funded by Americans acting secretly on behalf of the Third Reich. The penalty for violation: up to five years in prison and fines up to $250,000.
Canary Mission is run through Megamot Shalom — an Israeli nonprofit. It acts as an intelligence asset for Israel's Ministry of Strategic Affairs — an Israeli government agency. American citizens who donate to it are potentially funding a clandestine foreign influence operation on American soil.
"Those Americans who were financially supporting Canary Mission were potentially committing a serious crime, acting as agents of a foreign power. They were financing a clandestine foreign organization with ties to Israel's Ministry of Strategic Affairs — which was using Canary Mission to identify, detain and deport Americans entering the country."
The funding is channeled through US nonprofit intermediaries to allow donors to claim tax deductions — which are not permitted for donations to foreign charities. Two layers of legal exposure: FARA violations for acting as foreign agents, and potential tax fraud for claiming improper deductions on donations routed through shell organizations.
The San Francisco Jewish Community Federation admitted to funding Canary Mission — revealed by The Forward in 2019. The Natan and Lidia Peisach Family Foundation donated $100,000, per The Intercept (April 2025). The foundation's treasurer is married to a University of Pennsylvania trustee. Israel's Ministry of Strategic Affairs was itself concerned about FARA exposure and hired Washington DC law firm Sandler Reiff from 2018-2022 to analyze whether its advocacy activities violated FARA — a fact revealed in leaked internal documents. An internal memo stated: "Donors are not interested in donating to groups registered under FARA."
In January 2026, Drop Site News published an investigation uncovering the technical and organizational infrastructure behind Canary Mission — including strategic planning documents that had never before been seen publicly.
Canary Mission's internal goals for 2025 included: "Anonymity as a tool to scare the enemy" and "Bottom-up approach: Using individuals to take down orgs." The documents describe quarterly plans, meetings, donor briefings, and assessments of influence. Over 30 doxxers are employed using fake Facebook and social media accounts to track and upload personal information on activists. An Israeli company called Shefing — based in a WeWork office in Jerusalem, owned by French-Israeli Philippe Cohen — built the code and software used by both Canary Mission and an attempted spinoff called Museum of Online Antisemitism (MOA). The physical operation is run from a padlocked building in Israel. The financial trail is extensively obscured.
Canary Mission has moved beyond individual targeting to institutional leverage. Congressional committees now treat it as a legitimate source for government investigations.
The House Committee on Education and the Workforce sent letters to MIT and UC Berkeley citing professors' Canary Mission profiles as evidence of antisemitism requiring institutional response. In March 2025, the same committee contacted Northwestern University's First Amendment legal clinic — because its lawyers had chosen to represent protesters who blockaded Chicago's O'Hare airport in support of an arms embargo. Republican Reps. Tim Walberg and Burgess Owens cited one protester's Canary Mission page as evidence that the clinic's funding should be withdrawn. Not a court finding. Not a criminal charge. A Canary Mission page.
Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of UC Berkeley Law, denounced the site in 2023, warning it was chilling campus speech. J Street — which describes itself as "pro-Israel and pro-peace" — called it out directly: "Canary Mission is feeding the Trump Administration's agenda, weaponizing antisemitism to surveil and attempt to deport student activists. This isn't about protecting Jews — it's about silencing dissent."
The parallel to McCarthyism is not rhetorical. The structure is identical: an anonymous list of people accused of political disloyalty, compiled without due process, circulated to employers and government agencies, used to end careers and suppress speech — with accusers who face no accountability and targets who have no meaningful recourse.
All sources publicly available. Research collated by T. Denoyo with the assistance of Claude (Anthropic). Published April 30, 2026. This site does not represent the views of any employer or institution.