Drones for Intimidation
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Minnesota Public Radio Friday published an investigation into drone sightings in Minneapolis during President Trump’s recent surge of undisciplined paramilitary immigration agents into that city — including reports that suggest the use of drones for intimidation.
One activist told MPR she was woken up by a drone hovering in her backyard outside her second-story bedroom window. She subsequently recorded at least 16 possible drone sightings; before the surge, she had never seen one. She and others shared video and still photographs of many drone sightings with MPR.
A south Minneapolis woman interviewed by MPR said neighborhood residents were seeing drones all over. “People keep track in the neighborhood chats, ‘Ope, the drones are back tonight,’” she said. Another city resident said they saw a drone hovering 20 feet over a house being used to distribute groceries to people hiding from ICE, while another reported seeing multiple drones flying complex patterns over her neighborhood in January.
A lack of transparency
Unfortunately, the FAA has not built a system that allows ordinary people to identify the operator of drones they see flying over their homes and communities. And it's not clear that the feds are complying with the limited system the FAA has built, called Remote ID. That means that it can be hard to know for sure who is operating a particular drone. But while secrecy makes it hard to confirm, it sure looks like ICE or other federal agencies are using drone technology the same way they’re using other surveillance technologies: to intimidate protesters and observers.
Minneapolis police and Minnesota state police said the drone sightings did not comport with how they use drones and were not theirs, MPR reported. And DHS refused to comment on the drone sightings. The Washington Post reported in January, however, that “ICE has been using small drones to monitor some protests over the past year.”
And of course these flights come in a larger context of other abuses of technology by agencies like ICE and the Border Patrol. As my ACLU-Minnesota colleague Alicia Granse (who is part of the ACLU team suing DHS over its treatment of observers) has summarized it, that includes examples of observers and protesters:
- Being led to their own homes by federal agents.
- Having themselves, their vehicles, or their homes conspicuously photographed.
- Seeing vehicles identified as belonging to a federal agency parked outside their home.
- Being told they would be entered into a domestic terrorist watchlist.
- Having their Global Entry status revoked.
- Having their phones confiscated and being told that they’ve been cloned.
Intimidation by drone, it seems, needs to be added to the list. We have ourselves received reports from observers in another city of a drone flying low in front of people’s faces after an ICE protest, in what seemed to be a clear effort to intimidate. Veteran protesters also report drones swooping low over other protests in similar apparent intimidation attempts.
Surveillance, dominance, and control
In a 2024 white paper, we called for strict limits on the use of drones over protests to ensure that not only are they not used for intimidation, but that they not record protesters except where there is criminal behavior. As we pointed out then:
Sometimes police attend protests not to keep the peace but to intimidate and surveil. These kinds of abuses are especially likely to happen around protests among historically marginalized groups, or groups protesting the police themselves, or expressing other viewpoints that the police don’t like.
In addition, drones are often perceived as alien and hostile and frequently elicit a visceral response…. And by virtue of their position in the sky, they signify surveillance, dominance, and control. Human rights activists have pointed to the way drones have functioned as an intimidating and oppressive “technology of domination” in countries such as Afghanistan, Pakistan, China, and the Palestinian occupied territories.
Perhaps the most striking example of aircraft used to intimidate protesters was at the racial justice protests outside the White House in June 2020, when the Trump Administration deployed a military Blackhawk helicopter to disperse peaceful protesters by hovering low over a street, creating wind gusts strong enough to snap tree limbs. As we noted at the time, experts call this tactic a “show of force” and say it’s a common military tactic to “intimidate and remind potential enemies of your armed presence.” A Blackhawk helicopter is a whole other level compared to a small drone, but it dramatizes the intentions some in law enforcement can bring to a protest.
I hear a lot about "drones for good" from boosters, and drones do have a lot of good uses, but they should never be used for surveillance, let alone intimidation, of peaceful protesters in our country. Yet just such intimidation is emerging as a distinct “use case” for some in law enforcement, and policymakers need to respond accordingly.
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