Gwendolyn Sobkowiak | staff writer

I’ve been seeing less content criticizing United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on my Instagram feed this month. It turns out, it’s not just me.

This past year my regularly scheduled programming of Reels (usually featuring crafts and gardening content) had incrementally been replaced by videos about ICE.

Violent interactions between agents and civilians, tutorials on how to prevent burns from tear gas and comparisons of the U.S. Government to pre-World War II Germany weren’t my favorite thing to see, but they made me feel as though I was part of the conversation.

I felt like I had a perspective into the behind- the-scenes of the Minnesota and Chicago protests. There was a feeling of consensus about change that there hadn’t been previously. People on both sides of the political spectrum were coming together to call out injustice.

Anti-ICE posts on my feed started off as informational reels. They often included calls to action, and showed that the rates of deportation of people with no criminal history were skyrocketing. ICE officers were recorded entering private properties without proper warrants, using “stop and frisk” like policies to systematically target people of color and removing people who had been living as functional community members for over 30 years, in some cases.  

One video cited a study displaying statistics from the Cato Institute showing that 73% of individuals in ICE detention centers as of 2025 had no criminal convictions with the majority of criminal convictions related only to immigration or traffic violations.

Then Minneapolis happened. Videos changed from informational to pocket footage and seemed to multiply exponentially. Protests had been gaining traction following photos of 5-year-old Liam Ramos wearing a blue-bunny hat with an ICE officer’s hand on his backpack as he was being detained made its rounds of the algorithm. Clips of 56-year-old ChongLy “Scott” Thao being marched through snow by ICE in nothing but his boxers, even in spite of his U.S. citizen status, all came around the same time. Then videos of ICE officers shooting Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti in broad daylight, for “interfering with ICE investigations” came.

People I knew from high school were posting “ICE Out!” on their Instagram stories. My classmates were debating going to protests Downtown. It seemed like everyone and their mother had something to say about the situation. Celebrities posted informational content on how to contact your local representatives about abolishing ICE. It felt like we were reaching a boiling point of change.

Then suddenly everything went back to silence.

My feed has slowly inched back to normal; relatively free of political content and full of crafting. It was upsetting though. I knew that there were still thousands of people sitting in detention centers. But my Reels didn’t seem to be pertaining to that anymore.

I assumed it was that people I knew had just lost interest. There’s always a test tomorrow and a paper due next week in college. Sometimes people feel like they’ve done their piece by posting something on their story and just moving on.

But I felt like I was being kept up at night by this stuff, so it seemed pretty weird that it had all gone radio silent. It wasn’t as though I had stopped interacting with this kind of content. I hadn’t unfollowed any creators. I just wasn’t seeing their posts on the daily anymore.

This change came following massive legal turmoil surrounding ICE’s desire to put their hands into the social media mix.

According to a report by The New York Times, Google, Reddit, Discord and Meta, have all received “hundreds of administrative subpoenas from the Department of Homeland Security” all requesting access to the identifying information of anonymous accounts posting about ICE. The Times reported that requests went beyond that as well, going after individuals posting information about and organizing local anti-ICE protests.

As well, when things sensationalize, companies like Meta shift algorithms to suppress and diminish posts that could relate to the controversy. Videos with tags that surround ICE are less likely to show up on the main Reels page, requiring that they be sought out through searching or found directly on the home pages of posters. The same practices are done during elections, in order to not overtake users’ feeds or add fuel to the fire.

It would be silly to not assume that the subpoenas have contributed to tag suppression as social media companies scramble to remove themselves from governmental controversy. There’s plenty of reason for tech companies to be removing content to avoid further attention.

But that doesn’t allow for us to engage in any form of conversation. Posts about ICE allowed for us to be aware of an important agency within our government and their numerous ethical and legal violations. While I understand that this adminstration isn’t keen on us seeing this kind of content, it’s important for the general public to remain informed.

In my research, I came across numerous posters using “swipefishing,” a method for avoiding potential feed suppression where the user places an unrelated photo and tagline at the start of an image carousel before leading into an informational post about how to prevent unconstitutional ICE raids. I’m glad to see people find solutions around the problem.

My hope is that people will continue to seek out information about ICE’s comings and goings despite the silence on their feeds. If we all stay curious, we can remain informed voting constituents. Hopefully we can stop this mass deportation from hurting more innocent people and their families.

Gwendolyn Sobkowiak can be reached at sobkowiakg@duq.edu