On March 25, six people in masks approached Rümeysa Öztürk on a Somerville, Massachusetts, street. The group surrounded the Tufts University PhD student and claimed they were “the police.” As Öztürk began to call her sister, they escorted her away. Unable to contact her lawyer, Öztürk was shipped across several state lines. She was never charged with a crime. And it was only later that Öztürk’s lawyers learned that she had been detained by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement on suspicion of “support for Hamas.”
The claim did not make sense. Öztürk is not a well-known activist. The only reason for her arrest—and potential deportation—her lawyers and friends could find was a single op-ed in a student newspaper written in support of Palestine. How did such a small thing get her on ICE’s radar? How did it warrant an operation that played out like a disappearance?
The op-ed, which Öztürk co-wrote with three other students, had been published a year earlier. The only new element, which had appeared a month before her arrest, was a profile on a mysterious website dedicated to cataloging people who express pro-Palestine and anti-Zionist views: Canary Mission.
An anonymously run blog founded in 2014 to name and shame those publicly critical of the state of Israel, Canary Mission looks a bit like IMDb or an early internet wiki. Each profile carries a headshot, the offending individual’s institutional affiliations (most are professors or current or recent students), and a list of supposedly anti-Israel activities, all of which the website says are antisemitic.
The goal, Canary Mission says, is to “ensure that today’s radicals are not tomorrow’s employees” and “combat the rise in anti-Semitism on college campuses.” But lawyers, activists, and critics of the site worry that the consequences could now be more serious than diminished job prospects and that foreign students like Öztürk—who have been rounded up by the Trump administration—may have been targeted for imprisonment and deportation because they were listed on an anonymous blacklisting site. (Öztürk has since been returned to Massachusetts.)
“After being smeared on Canary Mission’s website, being falsely labeled as being antisemitic,” said Mahsa Khanbabai, a lawyer representing Öztürk, “Rümeysa was picked up by ICE and had her student status terminated in a matter of weeks.”
The Department of Homeland Security and ICE did not respond when asked whether they used Canary Mission to identify activists for deportation. Canary Mission and organizations reportedly affiliated with it did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
What’s clear, however, is that Canary Mission has been repeatedly cited in federal lawsuits against student activists and in official US government communications with universities, as the Trump administration detains students with little explanation. Canary Mission’s “about us” page claims its content meets “high standards of accuracy and authenticity,” but the spin it puts on pro-Palestinian activities is hardly objective—especially given the increasingly severe consequences for the people it describes. Attending an antiwar protest, for example, becomes “participation in a pro-Hamas rally;” criticism of Israeli policies is framed as “demonizing Israel.”
Öztürk’s Canary Mission page says she “engaged in anti-Israel activism in March 2024.” What Öztürk did that month, according to her lawyers, was co-write a single op-ed in the Tufts student newspaper, encouraging the school to “meaningfully engage with” a student government resolution asking the university to divest from Israel. “We, as graduate students, affirm the equal dignity and humanity of all people,” Öztürk and her co-authors wrote.
“People are very fearful, they’re looking over their shoulders.”
In February 2025—10 months after Öztürk’s op-ed—her headshot appeared on Canary Mission’s website. The page linked three times to her op-ed but provided no other examples of her supposed “anti-Israel activism”—let alone any illegal activities. When Öztürk visited a friend in early March, “she was concerned that there is this Canary Mission page,” her friend told my colleagues at Reveal. “I kept…trying to reassure her that you’re okay for now. I didn’t think it would be so immediate.”
When Öztürk was detained, Canary Mission claimed credit, asserting that her profile was the “primary cause” of her arrest. A Department of Homeland Security memo justifying her detention reportedly used language nearly identical to that of her Canary Mission page. Like Canary Mission, DHS cited her op-ed.
In the wake of Öztürk’s arrest, Mother Jones spoke with multiple academics from other countries who have decided to stop traveling to the United States due to concerns that their own Canary Mission profiles could lead to detention or questioning. Joseph Howley, a Columbia University classics professor, doesn’t worry much about his own Canary page; he has tenure and US citizenship. But for international scholars like Öztürk and other vulnerable people, “Canary Mission is incredibly dangerous,” he said.
“They have found that you can gin up this tissue-thin web of insinuation and bullshit,” Howley said, “and that escalates into…pulling a graduate student off the street and deporting them.”
There is a long history in the United States of private groups surveilling pro-Palestine organizers. Zachary Lockman, a New York University professor who serves on the free speech committee of the Middle East Studies Association, has fought that surveillance for decades. In 1983, he remembers, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and the Anti-Defamation League distributed pamphlets “listing ‘pro-terrorist’ professors.”
“I still have some at home as a keepsake,” he told me. Included on the list along with Lockman? Noam Chomsky and Edward Said, he notes.
In 1984, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s “college guide,” containing dossiers on the “campus enemies of Israel” at 100 universities, sometimes named specific student clubs, professors, or visiting speakers of concern. The book repeatedly faulted “foreign Arab students” for promulgating criticism of Israel: “The dramatic increase in the number of these students from 6,000 in 1964 to 60,000 today has led to a corresponding increase in anti-Israel activity on American campuses.”
With the war on terror came broadened attempts to catalog and shame those with supposedly subversive views on American foreign policy. In 2001, an organization led by Lynne Cheney, wife of then-Vice President Dick Cheney, produced a report titled, “Defending Civilization: How Our Universities Are Failing America and What Can Be Done About It.” It listed 117 professors, university staff members, and students who had spoken against the invasion of Afghanistan. One Massachusetts Institute of Technology anthropology professor, Hugh Gusterson, was condemned for saying Americans should “imagine the real suffering and grief of people in other countries” in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. A faculty member at Pomona College was added to the list for calling to “break the cycle of violence” in the Middle East. Cheney’s group, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, announced plans to send its list of names to 3,000 trustees across the country.
“Are you familiar with the Canary?” he remembers his interrogators asking. “They actually mentioned it to me!”
That was the mission of these analog blacklists: to “call the manager” on academics critical of the United States or Israel—and, potentially, to render them unemployable. “If somebody is declared to be antisemitic because they’ve been critical of Israel, who’s going to want to deal with them?” Lockman said. “So people are very fearful, they’re looking over their shoulders.”
In the 2000s, the lists moved online. An infamous early example was the website Masada2000, which hosted a “Self-Hating and/or Israel-Threatening (S.H.I.T.) Jew” list and named “over 8,000” people whom the site’s anonymous administrators considered anti-Israel.
Masada2000 went offline in 2007. Canary Mission filled the void seven years later. It “is not the first,” Lockman said, “but [it is] maybe the most effective.” Today, it holds profiles of more than 1,800 students, 1,100 professors, 300 medical professionals, and 2,100 people simply labeled “professionals.” (I am included on the website for my writing and social media posts about the killing of Palestinians by the Israel Defense Forces.)
Profiles on Canary Mission are optimized to soar to the top of Google results. It is a more professional operation than Masada2000—which was covered in low-resolution graphics and jokes about Muslims eating pork, with accompanying pig-oink audio cues. Canary Mission steered clear of that type of juvenile bigotry, adding to a veneer of legitimacy that some of its predecessors failed to achieve. By 2018, Canary Mission was reportedly being referenced in FBI interrogations and used by Israeli security personnel to question activists coming through Ben Gurion Airport.
Still, its potential use to detain someone in the United States—as Öztürk’s lawyers claim—would be new. “I think they’ve wanted for a long time to pull out all the stops, but they’ve never been in a position to do that,” Lockman said. “They’ve puttered along for many years. And with the Trump administration wanting information about student activists, they’re thrilled to provide it. This is maybe the opportunity they’ve been dreaming of for a very long time.”
The money and manpower behind Canary Mission are mysterious. “Why is it so important who we are?” Canary Mission’s founders wrote in a 2015 blog post a week after launching their site. “Maybe you want to know so you can threaten us, discredit us or punish us. Many of our detractors just want to know who we are so they can physically harm us.” The site is not registered with the IRS as either a for-profit or nonprofit entity. In 2018, an investigation by the Forward connected Canary Mission to a registered Israeli nonprofit called Megamot Shalom, or “Peace Trends.” Donations to Canary Mission, the outlet reported, were being routed through Megamot Shalom.
The Israeli nonprofit registry shows that Megamot Shalom, still active seven years after its launch, has only 11 employees. More than 99 percent of its budget—about a million dollars in fiscal year 2023—comes via donations from abroad. The purpose of Megamot Shalom, as reported to the Israeli Justice Ministry’s Corporations Authority, is to “preserve and ensure the strength of Israel’s national image and to act in the media against boycott, sanctions and divestment against Israel in the face of international challenges, using technological media tools.”
According to the Forward and Haaretz, a British resident of Jerusalem named Jonathan Jack Ian Bash operates Megamot Shalom. Bash, who signed the financial reports for the organization in 2023, is also listed online as a director of Body Clock Health Care Limited, a British company selling back pain treatments. Bash did not respond to a request for comment.
Attempts to hold Canary Mission liable for defamation have mostly failed, in part because would-be plaintiffs cannot say conclusively whether it is housed in the United States. Kinza Khan, a Pakistani American Muslim woman from Chicago, attempted to sue Canary Mission last year, in part for accusing her of having “justified Hamas terrorism and spread anti-Semitism online”—allegations she argued were inaccurate. This led, she said, to a barrage of threatening texts and voicemails in the inboxes of people and organizations with which she worked. But a judge dismissed the case because Khan’s lawyers could not identify “what type of entity Canary Mission is” and could not prove where it was based. CAIR-Chicago is now seeking class-action plaintiffs for a follow-up lawsuit.
“With the Trump administration wanting information about student activists, they’re thrilled to provide it. This is maybe the opportunity they’ve been dreaming of for a very long time.”
While the full scope of Canary Mission’s funding is not known, some money has been revealed. And donors include major American foundations. The Helen Diller Family Foundation listed a donation as “Canary Mission for Megamot Shalom” on its publicly accessible tax forms in 2016. (After journalists found the donations, the foundation stopped giving to either organization.) That same year, the Michael and Andrea Leven Family Foundation donated $50,000 to Megamot Shalom and told a Jewish Currents reporter in 2021 that the money was intended for Canary Mission.
Mother Jones identified two American foundations that have donated to Canary Mission more recently: the Natan and Lidia Peisach Family Foundation, which donated $100,000 in fiscal year 2023, and the Ann and Robert Fromer Charitable Foundation, which donated $20,000 that same year. Neither foundation responded to requests for comment.
Megamot Shalom has few known employees. But one individual deeply connected to far-right politics reportedly sat on its board. As of 2016, Rabbi Ben Packer was listed as a board member of Megamot Shalom on Israel’s public charity registry. Born in the United States, Packer—who says he was a “rabbi on campus” at Duke University and the University of North Carolina—now runs an ultranationalist youth hostel in Jerusalem and lives in a West Bank settlement. He has boasted of his friendship with Stephen Miller, the Trump adviser behind many of the president’s most controversial immigration policies.
During a phone interview with Mother Jones, Packer denied involvement with Megamot Shalom. He said he has “nothing to do with” the organization, does not know what it is, and has “no recollection” of being affiliated with either Canary Mission or Megamot Shalom. Still, Packer defended Canary Mission’s actions. “I think they do great work,” he said. “If they’re getting people who are doing antisemitic things on campus deported, who aren’t citizens, I think that makes a lot of sense. I don’t think it’s at all weird.”
Packer also confirmed his connection with Miller, who was an undergraduate at Duke when Packer claims to have worked there. At that time, Miller was active in campus pro-Israel politics. He wrote student newspaper columns inveighing against the school’s Palestine Solidarity Movement chapter and—as journalist Jean Guerrero reported—insisted to Duke administrators that there was “terrorist recruitment” happening at an on-campus Palestine Solidarity Movement conference. According to an administrator Guerrero interviewed, Miller was never able to provide proof.
“I think he’s a great guy,” Packer said of Miller. “I think he means well, I think he works very hard, I think he has the interests of the American people and the Jewish people really close to his heart.”
Canary Mission may be the premier online outlet for branding protesters and academics as terrorist sympathizers, but it is far from alone. StopAntisemitism is a pro-Israel group that broadcasts the names and photos of those it deems antisemitic—ranging from avowed neo-Nazis to activists like Greta Thunberg. (It is also asking the Department of Justice to investigate popular children’s content creator Ms. Rachel for allegedly disseminating “Hamas-aligned propaganda” when she drew attention to the number of children who have been killed in Gaza.) And there is Betar, a century-old Kahanist organization with deep ties to the Israeli far right. It was recently revived in the United States and claims to keep a list of potentially deportable noncitizens. Betar representatives say they’ve given that list to the US government.
Collectively, this online ecosystem has grown into an informal database ready for use by those hoping to punish activists—what attorney Diala Shamas calls a “public-private system of surveillance.”
That surveillance is now showing up in legal documents. Canary Mission has been cited in lawsuits against pro-Palestine protesters, including Mahmoud Khalil of Columbia University. The suit, brought by a group of Israeli American activists, accuses Khalil and others of serving as a “Hamas propaganda arm” in America and of having prior knowledge of the October 7, 2023, attacks in Israel. The plaintiffs cite Canary Mission profiles—Khalil’s and others’—31 times throughout their 79-page complaint to make the argument that Khalil is “aiding and abetting Hamas’ continuing acts of international terrorism.”
Öztürk, the Tufts PhD student detained in March, was released six weeks later. “Absent the consideration of the op-ed,” US District Judge William K. Sessions III said during her bail hearing, “there is no evidence here” as to why she was detained. The same day she was released, another student activist, Efe Ercelik of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, was released from immigration detention. The judge in Ercelik’s case ruled that he was jailed “almost exclusively” because he was targeted by Betar and Canary Mission.
Some lawmakers, too, are treating Canary Mission as a legitimate source for triggering government investigations. Last year, the House Committee on Education and the Workforce sent letters to schools such as MIT and UC Berkeley inquiring about those institutions’ responses to alleged antisemitism referenced in professors’ Canary Mission profiles. In March 2025, the same committee contacted Northwestern University’s First Amendment legal clinic, which, according to lawmakers, was “dedicat[ing] its resources to support illegal, antisemitic conduct.” The clinic’s lawyers had chosen to represent a group of people who blockaded Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport in support of an arms embargo on Israel. Republican Reps. Tim Walberg of Michigan and Burgess Owens of Utah cited the Canary Mission page of one protester as evidence that the clinic’s funding should be withdrawn.
“They asked me, ‘Have you ever participated in a protest?’”
Some academics targeted by Canary Mission, like Canadian sociologist Nathan Kalman-Lamb, have sworn off coming to the United States altogether. In January, a Department of Homeland Security official took Kalman-Lamb out of line at the Montreal airport—on his way to his book launch event in Washington, DC—and informed him that he was barred from entering the United States unless he acquired a visa, something that isn’t normally required for Canadian citizens. When he tried to enter the country again in March, he got a visa and contacted Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut to advocate with DHS on his behalf. But Kalman-Lamb was nonetheless taken aside again at the airport, where he was subjected to an extensive search—every item in his wallet was examined one by one—and hours of questioning.
“They asked me: ‘Have you ever participated in a protest? What are your opinions of violent protest? Have you ever participated in a protest that turned violent?’” said Kalman-Lamb, whose Canary Mission profile shows that over a year ago, he tweeted a selfie in support of a University of Toronto student encampment—an encampment the website refers to as “pro-Hamas.”
“We have evidence that you’ve endorsed violent protest,” he remembered the officer saying. Kalman-Lamb’s Canary Mission profile characterizes the student encampments of spring 2024 as violent.
“Then they asked me if I’d traveled to about a dozen countries,” he told Mother Jones. “They were all Muslim-majority nations, and Israel.”
“I’m 99 percent sure it’s because of Canary Mission,” Kalman-Lamb said.
Asked for comment, a DHS spokesperson said that its officers “enforce the law, not agendas” and that “there are no instances where political beliefs play a role in admissibility”—a statement that appears to be directly at odds with Trump administration policy.
After his ordeal, Kalman-Lamb has decided not to return to the US—that, he said, was the only reason he’s comfortable talking to journalists on the record. Other Canadian academics who spoke with Mother Jones are weighing similar decisions: canceling speaking engagements and withdrawing from conferences in order to avoid being detained.
“This is definitely the testing grounds for the administration,” said Khanbabai, Rümeysa Öztürk’s lawyer. “I think they felt that the pro-Palestinian advocates were probably the weakest link and they thought, ‘Let’s try this and see what happens. Let’s see what kind of pushback we get.’”
One Jewish Columbia graduate student, whose social media posts landed him on Canary Mission the better part of a decade ago, told Mother Jones that the change since then is “absolutely surreal.”
Back in 2017, “it was a completely different political moment,” the Columbia student said. “If anyone was worried, it was about non-state actors doxxing you—if people can see your Canary Mission, then maybe they can find your phone number or address and harass you.” Not much happened to him, he said, other than receiving some harassing emails. “I didn’t think there were a lot of actionable things that would happen, except maybe not being allowed into Israel.” Some students saw it as a badge of honor and joked about using Canary Mission as a dating website.
Now, as Republicans move to further restrict citizenship, Canary Mission is supporting a campaign by Republican Rep. Andy Ogles of Tennessee to revoke New York Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani’s citizenship and deport him from the country.
Prior to President Donald Trump’s reelection, these blacklisting groups scared pro-Palestinian activists, but the scale of things has changed. Andrew Kadi, a Palestinian American whose family holds Israeli citizenship, was detained and questioned for over eight hours by Israeli officials on his way to visit family in 2017.
“Are you familiar with the Canary?” he remembers his interrogators asking. “They actually mentioned it to me!”
Now, Kadi says, those same tactics are coming to the US: “You have federal agencies relying on something that is anonymously put together. It’s disturbing.”