The first thing you notice when you enter Sherman Austin’s Long Beach, California, apartment is the sounds. His cellphone buzzes constantly, mostly notifications requiring his attention from StopICE.net, a crowdsourced nationwide alert system he developed to let users know when federal immigration officers are nearby. Then there are the beeps. Follow them and they’ll lead you to Austin’s cramped bedroom, where two large computer screens sit inches from his bed. On one, columns of characters scroll continuously, Matrix-style, tracking traffic and potential attacks on a server he uses for StopICE. The beeps come from the other, which displays security camera feeds outside his apartment. Every time a camera spots a potential intruder, it issues a series of loud beeps. It beeps a lot.
Threats come in two main varieties. The first are promises to hurt or kill Austin himself. “You’re [sic] last days are coming close,” read one February email. A recent commenter on Austin’s Facebook wrote, “You’re just lucky I am out of the US at the moment and it would take me 10+ hours to get there, or I would have already slit your throat in front of your loved ones.”
Austin, who has a long history in activism for which he spent nearly a year in federal prison in the 2000s, isn’t particularly rattled by these messages. “Most are just talk,” he says. But the other type of threat feels far less nebulous. Austin believes it’s only a matter of time before he looks at his security monitors and sees federal agents crouching outside his door.
“I’m not doing anything illegal, but we all know how these things go,” he says. “They look for people to make an example of.”
Austin launched StopICE in February 2025, one of a constellation of digital tools that emerged in response to federal agents terrorizing communities. Users can text in sightings of ICE, which are then blasted out to other nearby users. This is legal: “Reporting on the activities of law enforcement is fully protected by the Constitution,” says Eric Goldman, who co-directs the High Tech Law Institute at Santa Clara University. “If the government is doing something in a public space, we’re allowed to report it, monitor it, catalog it, complain about it, protest it.”
It wouldn't be the first time the law protected those it ought to be punishing. That is essentially the basis of our capitalist system.