Dear MoveOn member,
An explosive investigative report this morning revealed that Donald Trump's Department of Homeland Security spied on MoveOn and our partners at the height of the family separation crisis, when we were organizing 750 peaceful protests across the country.1
Throughout American history, government monitoring, harassment, and surveillance has been used to stoke fear, attack free speech, and cripple important movements for social justice and civil rights.
We will not be silenced or intimidated. And we will not stand idly by while our government inappropriately surveils Americans exercising their First Amendment rights of freedom of speech and assembly—in this case speaking out against Trump's abhorrent policy of forcibly taking migrant children from their families and putting them in cages.
In this critical moment, MoveOn needs your help to beef up our cybersecurity, to fund the fight for answers through Congress and, if appropriate, the courts, and to double down on our work to stand up to Trump.
Will you rush an emergency contribution of $3 right now to help us fight back? Click here now.
Here's what we know happened so far: Looking Glass, a for-profit government contractor whose CEO was a donor to the Trump campaign, collected information on about 600 of the protests that MoveOn organized with the broader Families Belong Together coalition and other partners on June 30 of last year.2
That included monitoring the social media and online information about the events.3 They then passed along this information to Trump's Department of Homeland Security.4
Once the government received the information, the Trump administration deemed it important enough to share with many offices within the department, including ICE, Homeland Security Investigations, and so-called "fusion centers."5 Those "centers" are special law enforcement offices created after 9/11 that combine local police with federal officers to monitor terrorist activity, and they have long been accused of violating civil liberties.6
You read that right: DHS sent info about our peaceful protests to law enforcement groups focused on "terrorism."
Luckily, MoveOn's digital security protocols are best in class, and none of the private information of MoveOn members was hacked during this effort. But this operation was still a major violation of the First Amendment rights of hundreds of thousands of MoveOn members and our allies, and we must get to the bottom of exactly what happened and why Trump's government is continuing to monitor and harass activists opposed to his policies.
We already knew that the Trump administration was putting activists, lawyers, and journalists fighting the family separation crisis onto a mysterious "watch list."
Now, we're finding out that the administration was also—without any legitimate law enforcement reason—monitoring the Families Belong Together protests last summer, where hundreds of thousands of people from all backgrounds gathered to express their outrage at the administration's family separation and detention policies.
How is it that the Department of Homeland Security is spending its limited resources on disseminating information related to our peaceful protests, including at a time when white nationalist violence is on the rise? We must come together in this dangerous time to stand up to Trump's authoritarianism and protect our civil liberties and democracy.
Stand with us, Eddie. Click here to chip in $3 now.
Thanks for all you do.
–Robert, Kenia, Nick, Allison, and the rest of the team
Sources:
Want to support our work? The MoveOn community will work every moment, day by day and year by year, to resist Trump's agenda, contain the damage, defeat hate with love, and begin the process of swinging the nation's pendulum back toward sanity, decency, and the kind of future that we must never give up on. And to do it we need your support, now more than ever. Will you stand with us?
Click here to chip in $3, or whatever you can afford.
Contributions to MoveOn.org Civic Action are not tax deductible as charitable contributions for federal income tax purposes. This email was sent to Eddie Alfaro on April 29th, 2019. To change your email address or update your contact info, click here. To remove yourself from this list, click here.
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