The FBI is calling arrested protesters at their homes and asking them to spy on their friends.

"They were asking me to inform."

— John Mark Rozendaal, a cellist who played at Delaney Hall ICE protests before federal agents phoned him asking for names

John Mark Rozendaal went to Newark with his cello.

On the evening of May 29, 2026, he sat on a concrete barricade outside Delaney Hall, a privately operated ICE detention center in Newark, New Jersey, and played music. The protests had been going on for nearly a month, sparked by a hunger strike from detainees inside the facility who reported ghastly conditions. Rozendaal considered music "a deescalatory thing to do."

Within hours, New Jersey State Police and ICE agents issued a dispersal order. Officers deployed tear gas, flash-bangs, and chemical weapons. Mounted police charged through the crowd. Rozendaal was arrested and charged with obstructing law enforcement.

A week later, he received a phone call. The number was registered to the FBI's New York field office.

"The agent said, 'We're calling because you were arrested at Delaney Hall,'" Rozendaal told The Intercept. In the minutes that followed, federal agents asked if he would provide information on "anybody planning to go to Delaney Hall with not the right intentions."

Rozendaal declined immediately and invoked his right to remain silent.

He is not an isolated case.

According to Benjamin Van Meter, a deputy public defender with the Essex County Public Defender's Office, at least half of the approximately 90 people arrested at Delaney Hall have received similar calls from the FBI. Agents are phoning protesters at their homes, seeking information about who they associate with and what they plan to do next.

Van Meter filed a formal complaint demanding the FBI cease all contact with his clients without counsel present. His letter was addressed to Robert Frazer, the U.S. attorney for the District of New Jersey, and two senior FBI officials in New York and New Jersey.

"These attempts at contacting our clients at their homes and by phone violate their right to counsel," Van Meter wrote. "Any further efforts to question our clients are a continued violation of their constitutional right to counsel."

The Department of Justice did not respond to a request for comment. The FBI declined to comment.

Translation: the government is using the oldest COINTELPRO trick in the book, and it is still working because it was never truly abolished.

The strategy is deliberate. FBI informant operations serve two purposes simultaneously: they gather intelligence on protest movements while sowing paranoia and distrust among activists. When protesters begin wondering whether their friends have been flipped, the movement fractures. When people hesitate to gather, to organize, to show up, the government has achieved its objective without firing a shot.

The Delaney Hall story is part of a broader pattern of federal infiltration across anti-ICE protest sites nationwide.

In Minneapolis, the Department of Justice unsealed a federal indictment on June 16 against 15 people for alleged conspiracy to impede and injure federal officers during ICE's Operation Metro Surge. The indictment is built largely on seized Signal messages from more than a dozen encrypted groups, citing over 100 specific text messages. The government's case also references voicemails, direct messages, and approximately 20 Signal calls exchanged between defendants.

How did the federal government access supposedly encrypted communications? The indictment does not say directly, but clues suggest law enforcement obtained physical access to at least some of the defendants' devices. Signal provides end-to-end encryption for messages in transit, but it offers no protection if your phone ends up in the hands of federal agents.

FBI Director Kash Patel said in a podcast interview earlier this year that federal law enforcement had opened an investigation into Minnesota ICE watchers who used Signal groups to share information about immigration agents operating in their communities. The 15 indicted face charges including conspiracy, solicitation to commit a crime of violence, and destruction of government property.

In Newark, the surveillance operation went beyond federal agencies. Court records show that Newark Police detectives went undercover inside the Delaney Hall protests to monitor demonstrators and execute an arrest. Two plainclothes detectives embedded themselves in the crowd and relayed real-time information to surveillance units. They arrested Samuel Becker, a protester who had been identified as responsible for dragging a tarp into a fire at an earlier protest.

But Becker and two eyewitnesses say ICE agents also participated in the arrest, chasing and grabbing him before handing him over to a Newark police officer. The official police complaint omits ICE's involvement entirely, attributing the arrest to Newark police and Essex County Sheriff's Office SWAT personnel.

The discrepancy matters. New Jersey passed a sanctuary law in March 2026 that prohibits state police from assisting immigration agents in enforcement of federal immigration law. The law leaves exceptions for state criminal matters, but the Amol Sinha, executive director of the ACLU of New Jersey, has said that the version he and others wanted would have banned all police cooperation with ICE.

"These are moments that should be celebrated as part of democracy and not viewed through the lens of suspicion," Sinha said of undercover operations at protests.

The Prairieland trial in Texas demonstrated what happens when the FBI's informant strategy works. In March 2026, a federal jury convicted eight defendants of terrorism charges for their participation in an anti-ICE protest in Northern Texas where a shooting occurred. Prosecutors secured convictions largely through cooperating witnesses who testified against their co-defendants as part of plea deals.

Xavier T. de Janon, an attorney with the People's Law Collective, told The Intercept that the Prairieland prosecution was "made possible by cooperators." Without defendants willing to testify against each other, he said, "the case would have been extraordinarily different."

In contrast, protesters in the Stop Cop City movement in Atlanta and the J20 inauguration protesters at Trump's first inauguration refused to cooperate. In both cases, mass federal prosecutions collapsed because the government could not break solidarity among defendants.

The Trump Justice Department has accumulated "hundreds of failures" in its efforts to prosecute protest movements, according to de Janon. But the strategy remains simple: throw enough charges at enough people, offer plea deals that incentivize cooperation, and hope the spaghetti sticks.

In Spokane, Washington, three anti-ICE demonstrators were convicted in May on conspiracy charges for impeding federal officers. The original federal prosecutor in that case resigned rather than sign the indictments, saying they were not warranted. His successor moved forward anyway.

Rozendaal sees the purpose clearly. "I think the real intent is to divide us, to make us scared to talk to each other, too scared to talk in general, scared to go to Delaney Hall," he said. "It won't work."

He may be right. Or he may not. The FBI has been on the wrong side of history every time it tried these tactics. That has never stopped it from trying them again.

The surveillance of anti-ICE protesters is happening at precisely the moment when the Trump administration faces a series of judicial setbacks in its broader efforts to control the electoral system. Courts have repeatedly blocked the DOJ's attempts to obtain state voter files, with Trump-appointed judges responsible for more than half of the defeats. The Department of Homeland Security is pressuring states to change their election laws by withholding federal funding. An executive order threatens to block US Postal Service delivery of ballots in states that refuse to share voter data.

The same administration that cannot successfully compel states to hand over voter lists is happily seizing phones, infiltrating protests, and turning arrested cellists into potential informants.

The lesson from Prairieland is not that the government has perfected mass prosecution. It is that solidarity is the only effective defense against it. When cooperators talk, convictions follow. When people refuse to break, the charges fall apart.

Rozendaal went to Newark with his cello to play music. The FBI called to ask for names.

The question for the rest of the country is whether the sound of a cello will be enough to drown out the sound of the phone ringing.