"Google Fulfilled ICE Subpoena Demanding Student Journalist’s Bank and Credit Card Numbers" 10 February 2026

Google fulfilled an Immigration and Customs Enforcement subpoena that demanded a wide array of personal data on a student activist and journalist, including his credit card and bank account numbers, according to a copy of an ICE subpoena obtained by The Intercept.

Amandla Thomas-Johnson had attended a protest targeting companies that supplied weapons to Israel at a Cornell University job fair in 2024 for all of five minutes, but the action got him banned from campus. When President Donald Trump assumed office and issued a series of executive orders targeting students who protested in support of Palestinians, Thomas-Johnson and his friend Momodou Taal went into hiding.

Google informed Thomas-Johnson via a brief email in April that it had already shared his metadata with the Department of Homeland Security, as The Intercept previously reported. But the full extent of the information the agency sought — including usernames, addresses, itemized list of services, including any IP masking services, telephone or instrument numbers, subscriber numbers or identities, and credit card and bank account numbers — was not previously known...

...Thomas-Johnson, who is British, believes that ICE requested that information to track and eventually detain him - but he had already fled to Geneva, Switzerland and is now in Dakar, Senegal...

...In addition to Thomas-Johnson’s case, the letter refers to other instances in which technology companies provided user data to DHS, including a subpoena sent to Meta to “unmask” the identities of users who documented immigration raids in California. Unlike Thomas-Johnson, users in that case were given the chance to fight the subpoena because they were made aware of it before Meta complied...

...The ICE subpoena requested the detailed information linked to Thomas-Johnson’s Gmail account. Thomas-Johnson confirmed to The Intercept that he had attached his bank and credit card numbers to his account to buy apps.

Google did not respond to a request for comment...