The founder of one of the largest Facebook pages to track and report federal immigration activity activity in the Chicago area during the Trump administration’s Operation Midway Blitz is fighting back after Facebook disabled the page in October.
In a lawsuit filed Wednesday, Cicero small business owner Kassandra “Kae” Rosado alleged U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi and U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem coerced Facebook into removing the popular “ICE Sighting-Chicagoland” page, violating Rosado’s First Amendment rights.
“Defendants retaliated against Rosado’s Facebook group for the simple reason that the government disfavors the speech being shared. But the government has no legitimate interest in ‘stopping private actors from speaking as they wish’ to ‘tilt public debate in a preferred direction,’” the lawsuit reads.
Rosado started the page in January 2025 to keep individuals and small businesses informed about where U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement was operating in Chicago, according to the lawsuit. The page was initially made up of fellow business owners and Rosado’s friends and family. Group membership increased in September as ICE enforcement surged in the city and surrounding suburbs.
The page had almost 100,000 members by October, with thousands of posts and comments per day from members sharing information about violent encounters and arrests across the city, according to the lawsuit.
But on Oct. 12, right-wing activist and Trump ally Laura Loomer tagged Noem and Bondi in a post claiming that the Facebook page and others like it “are getting people killed.” The next day, Loomer said in a post that a Department of Justice source told her that they had contacted executives at Meta, Facebook’s parent company, “to tell them they need to remove these ICE tracking pages from the platform.”
Noem and Bondi announced the removal of the Facebook page on their social media accounts on Oct. 14. “Anti-ICE radicals are using social media apps to dox, threaten, and terrorize the brave men and women of ICE and their families,” Noem said in the post.
According to the suit, Rosado was notified by Facebook that the page was disabled because it “went against the Community Standards multiple times.”
While the page was active, the suit said Facebook moderators had removed five posts in the group that were not created or approved by Rosado or her moderators. Additionally, the suit said Facebook had previously advised Rosado that “it had only identified this handful of ‘participant violations’ of its rules, which ‘don’t hurt your group.’”
“By censoring our group, the government continues to erode our trust,” Rosado said in a statement. “They silenced not only my voice, but the voices of nearly 100,000 other community members.”
Rosado filed the suit with Mark Hodges, an Indiana resident who created the app Eyes Up, which allowed users to record, securely store and view videos of ICE officers committing potential civil rights violations. According to the suit, Apple removed the app from the App Store in October, allegedly after pressure from the federal government and violating Hodges’ First Amendment-protected right to record law enforcement in public.
The Department of Justice, Apple and Meta did not respond immediately to requests for comment.
In a statement, the Department of Homeland Security’s Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said, “ICE tracking apps put the lives of the men and women of law enforcement in danger as they go after terrorists, vicious gangs and violent criminal rings.”
“But, of course, FIRE spins this correct decision for Apple to remove these apps as them caving to pressure instead of helping prevent further harm to federal officers,” she added.
The lawsuit asks the court to declare that Bondi and Noem’s coercion of Facebook and Apple suppressed disfavored speech, which violates the First Amendment.
“Plaintiffs bring this case to preserve our country’s fundamental character as a free nation, asking this Court to protect the basic First Amendment right to share information about our government and its activities,” the suit said.
