Imagine you attend a protest, like hundreds of thousands of Americans have since President Donald Trump began his second term. Perhaps it is a No Kings event, or a local ICE demonstration to protest Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s crackdown on immigrants in your community. During the protest, you take a video of yourself and your fellow protesters, caption it “Abolish ICE,” and upload it to Instagram. A few weeks later, there’s a knock on your door. Federal agents stand before you, demanding to question you.

You’re wondering to yourself: Do they know about the protest I attended? Are they legally allowed to track me? Do I have to comply?

The answer to these first two questions is, shockingly, yes, and it’s made possible in part by a little-known power that the Trump administration has supercharged in recent months. The answer to the last question is much more complicated. The Department of Homeland Security is one of a number of federal agencies with something called administrative subpoena power, and it has been leveraging that tool in unprecedented ways under Trump 2.0. The Washington Post detailed these abuses this week, focusing on the story of a U.S. citizen targeted by DHS for simply emailing a federal prosecutor his opinion about the federal government’s case against an Afghan national facing deportation.

How can something like this happen? Congress has granted administrative subpoena power to federal agencies, like the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Federal Communications Commission, to allow them to access information quickly to make decisions about issues under their purview. A key distinction between administrative subpoenas and civil or criminal ones is that federal agencies do not need a judge’s sign-off. These agencies retain the power to approve administrative subpoenas themselves. This also means that agencies can demand documents without needing to prove that there is an ongoing investigation into or probable cause against a person when issuing administrative subpoenas.

Federal agencies are not legally required to disclose how many administrative subpoenas they issue, but under the Trump administration, unnamed sources told the Post, the volume of administrative subpoenas is “well into the thousands, if not tens of thousands.” Lindsay Nash, a professor at Cardozo School of Law, authored a study on the immigration subpoena power and found, through publicly available regulations and internal records, that ICE has empowered its employees—even those focused on civil immigration enforcement—“to demand records and testimony from any person or entity in order to obtain information for any civil or criminal investigation within the agency’s broad domain.”

“At present, there is generally no requirement that officers have probable cause, identify the suspected violation, or exercise restraint,” Nash wrote. This is being exemplified with abuses like the one documented in the Post story, plus footage of federal agents taking pictures of protesters and threatening to add them to “a nice little database,” which some anonymous national security officials claim does in fact exist as a way for DHS and the FBI to track people labeled as “domestic terrorists.” (DHS publicly denies that there is such a database.)

The Trump administration’s heavy use of administrative subpoenas comes as the judiciary—including Republican-appointed judges—has been turning against its immigration enforcement tactics. Just this week, a court blocked the White House from ending temporary protected status for over 350,000 Haitian immigrants living in the U.S., while the chief judge of the District of Minnesota concluded that ICE has most likely violated more court orders in January alone than “some federal agencies have violated in their entire existence.”

Administrative subpoenas are a convenient work-around for an administration that knows it faces an uphill battle if it takes its information requests to a judge, a process that requires a formal investigation. Instead of having to meet a strict legal standard, DHS can issue administrative subpoenas to private individuals, tech companies, schools, state governments, and other entities in order to access information about people it’s interested in targeting. It has already tried to take this path to acquire data on folks who track ICE in their local communities. Generally, targeted organizations do not have to notify individuals that their information is being sought by the federal government. However, these groups are not actually obliged to comply with these subpoenas absent judicial action. As Michelle Lapointe, legal director at American Immigration Council, told Slate, administrative subpoenas are not self-enforcing. “When people receive an administrative subpoena from ICE, technically they don’t have to respond,” she said. “The agency can go to court and seek the records to be compelled from the individual who is served with the subpoena. But it has to do that extra step to make it enforceable.”

Lapointe noted that oftentimes recipients of these subpoenas do end up complying out of fear, which DHS appears to be manipulating. The Post story, for instance, described what happened to the U.S. citizen who had emailed the federal prosecutor: Federal agents showed up at his doorstep after he failed to comply with an administrative subpoena. The agents questioned him about the email, asking how he had found the attorney’s email address—through a basic Google search. After about 20 minutes, the agents left.

Critically, tech companies, including Google and Meta, have received administration subpoenas since Trump took office last year, but it’s not always clear when they comply. A Google spokesperson told TechCrunch that it pushes back against overbroad or improper subpoenas, while spokespeople for Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, and Snap told the Post their companies alert users about administrative subpoena requests unless they are barred from doing so or face extenuating circumstances.

In a case about six separate Instagram accounts that named and shamed a Border Patrol agent who was part of the Los Angeles immigration raids last summer, DHS sent Meta an administrative subpoena asking for the accounts’ names, email addresses, and phone numbers. In that instance, the Instagram account users were made aware of the subpoena, and a judge ordered Meta not to comply.

The issue here is that Americans are left to simply hope these tech companies operate in good faith and out of the goodness of their hearts, something that “should be alarming to all of us,” Lapointe noted. The threat remains that these companies may end up complying with DHS requests in order to get the administration off their backs, even when subpoenas are unwarranted. “I do think the acquiescence of tech and government makes it especially difficult as a functional matter to protect individual rights when you have administrative subpoena authority,” Dennis Fan, an associate professor at Columbia Law School and a former federal prosecutor, told Slate. Attending a protest is a constitutionally protected right, as is writing an email that contains your political opinions, but the Trump administration is finding ways to use these actions against its citizens by leaning into third parties—aka Big Tech—who have access to your personal, identifying information. These are companies that have positioned themselves as friendly partners of the White House, given that many of the country’s tech billionaires personally donated to Trump’s inauguration, then were conspicuously seated in the front row.

Where does that leave the average American? The answer is complicated. Lapointe believes that the best thing we can do is remain aware of our constitutional rights and not let Big Tech get away with selling out Americans without a fight. “I think pressure can be brought to bear, the more we raise awareness that these requests could come through and that the tech companies might receive them, requesting your information,” Lapointe said. “Using public pressure campaigns to encourage them to resist these attempts to get at private information could be helpful.”

So if you exercise your First Amendment right to protest injustices you believe your government is committing, you risk being targeted by that very government. And if you don’t want Big Tech helping that government target you? You may have to be right back at that protest again.