It’s easy to see why Mark Hodges prefers the deep woods of Brown County. This is a peaceful place to raise his kids, and his yard offers stunning views of the rolling hills.
Then he goes back inside. He sits at his computer, and Hodges watches hour after hour of ICE agents smashing car windows, tackling protesters and brandishing weapons.
“What I see, quite frankly, I will never be able to shake,” he said.
Hodges began collecting footage of federal law enforcement last summer when protesters clashed with ICE in the streets of Los Angeles. Videos he bookmarked on Facebook and TikTok were there one day and gone the next.
“These videos were disappearing, and it seemed like it would be a good idea to try and preserve as many as we could for government accountability purposes,” Hodges said.
He created Eyes Up for his own use but after talking with others who were interested in his work, Hodges launched a web app. He founded Kreisau Group LLC, a network of volunteers named for a resistance movement in Nazi Germany.
Eyes Up launched on the App Store in August, just before ICE launched Operation Midway Blitz in Chicago. Hodges recruited around 30 volunteers to verify and locate videos.
“We had thousands of downloads in days,” he said. “It was looking fairly promising, and people were submitting things.”
As Eyes Up and other ICE watchdog apps such as ICEBlock grew, the Department of Justice took notice. In early October, Apple removed those apps from its store, citing guidance from law enforcement. In a statement to Fox News, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi said they did so at her demand.
“When Apple pulled the plug on it, downloads for that stopped immediately,” Hodges said. “Usage of it then also stopped.”
Bondi described apps used to track ICE in real time as a threat to officers’ safety. But Eyes Up doesn’t do that.
Neither the Department of Justice nor Apple responded to a request for comment.
While the Eyes Up app remains on Android and a website is still online, Hodges said the effort hasn’t recovered from Apple’s takedown.
That’s when FIRE reached out – a free speech organization that takes First Amendment issues to court.
Colin McDonell, a senior attorney at FIRE, is representing Hodges.
“If the government isn't allowed to censor speech directly because it would violate the First Amendment, the government can't do it indirectly either by coercing private entities like Apple and Facebook,” he said.
McDonell said the case is strong because of the overall context of government challenges to critical speech.
“The core First Amendment right at issue here is the right to share information about your government,” McDonell said. “We're not talking about confidential information that was unlawfully obtained. We're talking about information about what the government and the government employees working for us are doing in public.”
Filming officers is legal, but ICE agents have threatened to put people documenting them on a “domestic terrorist list.” President Trump directed the government to identify a list of “left wing terrorists” in September. Bondi refused to answer questions from Congress on Wednesday about who’s on it.
There’s a lot at stake for Hodges in filing a lawsuit. He has a full-time job as a videographer and two children, the youngest of whom was born just last week. He believes based on the government’s changing definition he may already be considered a terrorist.
“Do they likely view me that way? Probably, yeah,” Hodges said. “That is one of the reasons why I've been a little hesitant to come forward.”
He’s filing jointly with Kassandra Rosado, a Chicago resident whose Facebook page tracking ICE sightings was disabled by that platform.
Hodges said the most important thing for him isn’t immigration policy or what’s legal and what’s not. It’s about the way people are treated.
“You need to be treated with respect,” he said. “I think that that's certainly a Midwestern value, it's an American value, and it is deeply disturbing to see people being treated like animals, people being just absolutely brutalized.”
