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, 43, is slim and lithe, with a patchy beard covering his angular face. Today, a cold rainy one in February, he’s wearing a gray-checked flannel and has his long dreadlocks partially tucked under a black baseball cap bearing a picture of a black panther. Despite his radical pedigree and a sideline as a competitive boxer—he turned pro in his mid-30s for six featherweight bouts—he’s an unassuming presence.

A set designer could not improve on his apartment’s vibe. The walls are adorned with an electric guitar, boxing gloves, a Malcolm X photo, and a map of tribal lands in the American Southwest. Much of the furniture is handmade. On one shelf are drills he uses doing contract electrical work. On another is a Rubik’s Cube, a xylophone, and three dozen books, including W.E.B. Du Bois’ Black Reconstruction in America, Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, Mark Bray’s Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook, and the SAS Ultimate Guide to Combat.

Despite death threats and legal scrutiny, Austin’s site provides real-time information to over half a million subscribers. Gabriella Angotti-Jones

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.”

Nevertheless, the Trump administration has declared war on ICE-spotting apps. In June, the agency’s acting director, Todd Lyons, accused one app, ICEBlock, of painting “a target on federal law enforcement officers’ backs” and contributing to a “500% increase in assaults” against them. Pressure from the administration prompted Apple and Google to remove the app and others like it, including Red Dot and Deicer, from their app stores in October. That same month, Facebook suspended an ICE watch group in Chicago.

Austin saw this crackdown coming. It’s why he designed StopICE as a text-based web service, not a downloadable app, which meant it survived this purge. “I built it this way for a reason,” he says. “I knew DOJ and DHS was going to pressure service providers to remove the apps.”

But StopICE’s survival means that Austin is under more scrutiny than ever. In September, the Department of Homeland Security subpoenaed Meta to turn over account information related to StopICE’s Instagram page. Austin challenged the subpoena, and it was ultimately withdrawn. But Austin sees traffic daily on StopICE from DHS-owned IP addresses. He suspects Customs and Border Protection agents were behind an attempted attack on StopICE’s main server in January. He believes one of them sent an ominous DM recently—“We’re coming for you. Tracking your every move”—which he traced to an agent whose Instagram bio included “1488 SS,” clear neo-Nazi symbology; CBP did not respond to a request for comment.

“Things have gotten to where people have wanted me not to stay here because there’s so many threats coming in,” Austin says. “But they’re not running me out of my own block.”

As StopICE expands—it now has more than half a million subscribers—Austin is dealing with the kind of growing pains many tech platforms face. He’s constantly adding features and fending off hackers, but doing it almost entirely himself, for no money, in this tiny apartment. Whereas many doing such work closely guard their identity, Austin is adamant that, in contrast with the masked agents he’s alerting people about, he has nothing to hide.

“The government’s narrative is, ‘We’ve got to track these people down who are building these apps, interfering with federal agents, trying not to be caught,’” he says. “My response is: ‘I’m right here. You have my name. You know where I live. If you want to do something, come do it.’”

“You have my name. You know where I live. If you want to do something, come do it,” says Austin.Gabriella Angotti-Jones

Heavily armed federal agents have shown up on his doorstep before. On January 24, 2002, when he was 18 and still living in his mother’s house in Sherman Oaks, his twin sister woke him from a nap to tell him there were suspicious-looking vehicles outside. When he went to the door, two FBI agents pulled him through as more agents emerged from the bushes. He wasn’t surprised.

Austin was already a gifted programmer and a committed anarchist. At 16, he’d launched RaisetheFist.com, which ran stories about Mexico’s Zapatista uprising and anti-capitalist protests in the Pacific Northwest. The site became an organizing hub that also hosted other similarly minded websites on its platform.

“It promoted the idea of taking direct action, whether through nonviolent protests, civil disobedience, or promoting self-defense,” Austin says. RaisetheFist.com became popular enough to draw attention from federal agents. “I’d log connections that would come in from the FBI, the Defense Department, and other government agencies.”

The day the FBI stormed his mom’s home was not his first tangle with the law. Austin hoists his right pant leg to show me several scars on his calf, remnants of an encounter with Long Beach police during a chaotic 2001 May Day protest. “I got shot in the leg,” he says. “It was a rubber shell packed into a shotgun.” He runs his finger over the largest mark. “They couldn’t take this one out in the hospital. It was too close to the bone.”

After 9/11, law enforcement’s interest in RaisetheFist.com intensified. The FBI began intercepting all data crossing his DSL line, gaining access to his AOL Instant Messenger account. Unmarked cars parked outside his house, then quickly drove away when he got home, Austin says. When the FBI eventually raided his home, special agents confiscated Austin’s computers and questioned him for hours but didn’t arrest him. The following week, he drove to New York to protest the World Economic Forum. There, he was arrested by the NYPD, interrogated, released, then immediately rearrested by the FBI, which held him in solitary confinement for more than a week.

“They put me on a cellblock with two people supposedly involved in al-Qaeda,” he says. “One was convicted of the USS Cole bombing and one of bombing the US Embassy in Kenya. I was an 18-year-old kid who had a website.”

Austin was asked repeatedly about crude bombmaking instructions that appeared on a site RaisetheFist.com hosted. Austin hadn’t written them, and such material had previously been considered constitutionally protected speech. He was released and returned to California.

Austin’s case attracted attention from high-profile academic and activist figures like Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, and Rage Against the Machine’s Zack de la Rocha. But after federal prosecutors threatened a “terrorism enhancement” that could have added 20 years to any sentence, he pleaded guilty to distributing the bombmaking information. (Notably, the author of the material was never charged.) Prosecutors sought a four-month prison term, but the judge imposed a year. Austin served 11 months and later three years of probation, which barred him from using computers. Once his probation ended, he launched CopWatchLA.org, which collected civilian-submitted police complaints in a searchable database.

When Austin’s kids were born, he stepped back a bit from organizing, but President Donald Trump’s brutal immigration agenda drew him in again. “When I see people kidnapped by ICE, that affects me, because I know what it’s like to be kidnapped by federal agents,” he says. “It affects me physically, like a burning feeling in my stomach.” He worries about the potential impact on his family, but the price of inaction feels steeper. “My kids are teenagers now. I want to be that example to them that despite threats of retaliation and violence, you’ve still got to stand up and fight back.”

When I first spoke with Austin in early April 2025, StopICE had about 9,000 subscribers. After the LA crackdown, it had nearly 300,000. After Minneapolis, 500,000. Because StopICE is a crowdsourced platform, each new user makes it more useful, but there’s a catch. Every alert StopICE sends costs a fraction of a penny, but when alerts go to thousands of subscribers, those fractions add up. So far, it’s cost up to $8,000 or so a month, but as StopICE grows, expenses could rise exponentially.

Austin has raised about $48,000 via GoFundMe, but the budget is tight enough that he has to triage alerts. When one comes in that is vague, it will initially be pushed to only 30 percent of users in that area. If more information emerges, it is sent to more. This metering means some subscribers might not get a needed alert in a timely fashion, Austin acknowledges. “My goal is to continue to increase the capacity of alerts, but a lot of that comes down to resources,” he says.

Austin is the only full-time moderator checking submissions, and for the site’s first several months, no alerts went out until he’d personally reviewed them. He’s since automated some of the process and is working to onboard more human moderators. But StopICE is practically a full-time unpaid job. “He falls asleep on the computer,” says Coyotl Tezcatlipoca, who knows Austin through organizing and from playing in a band together since the two were teenagers. “Sometimes, he doesn’t eat. He’s consumed by it.”

When you subscribe to StopICE, the system asks only the area where you want alerts and the phone number to which to send them. You don’t have to provide any other identifying information. StopICE doesn’t track user locations either. This is intentional: If the government or anyone else accesses StopICE’s data, there’d be little to find.

Austin spent almost a year in federal prison in relation to his work hosting an anarchist website.Gabriella Angotti-Jones

Austin’s commitment to user privacy is another reason he doesn’t shield his own. He wants everyone to know the person behind StopICE is the same one who’s been challenging the federal government for most of his life. “We really can’t trust the information that comes from the apps. But I know Sherman personally, so I trust him,” says Ron Gochez, leader of Unión del Barrio, which runs patrols monitoring immigration agents in Southern California. “I’m glad people like him, trusted members of the community, are doing that work.”

Recently, Austin has added several new functions, including a database of vehicle license plates used for immigration enforcement and a way for users to get alerts via Signal. But because StopICE doesn’t collect user data, measuring effectiveness is tricky. There are no real metrics for deportations averted or immigrants able to go to work without fear.

“People keep telling me it’s an important tool they rely on, whether it’s rapid response groups or just to know what’s going on in the neighborhood,” he says. “Sometimes behind the computer, you’re disconnected from the fact people are using this to help keep each other safe.”

Sitting in his apartment, he told me he sometimes imagines the pretext the FBI might one day use to justify kicking in his door. It goes something like this: A StopICE user sends an alert containing an exhortation to do something illegal, like damage ICE vehicles or attack agents, which slips by the auto moderators and goes to subscribers. According to Lauren Regan, founder and senior staff attorney at the Civil Liberties Defense Center, which represents Austin, whether StopICE would be liable for distributing this kind of information isn’t clear. Social media companies typically aren’t. But Austin isn’t a billionaire with a fleet of lawyers.

“The current test for where the line is drawn between free speech and true threats is whether an individual is named so they’d reasonably be in fear,” she says. “There’s a line between spicy rhetoric and true threat. So there are protections available for rich guys like Mark Zuckerberg. We’d certainly attempt to apply those to Sherman.”

Does Austin find it ironic that the scenarios he worries about so closely mirror what already sent him to federal prison? “Yeah, it brings back a lot of memories,” he says. “When I see them saying, ‘If you track or criticize ICE agents, you’re a domestic terrorist,’ that was the same sentiment when they came after me with RaisetheFist.”

“I’m not looking to get arrested,” he says, nodding toward his front door. “I’m not looking for conflict, but I know conflict is inevitable. To me, what’s more important is being in a fight and using my skill set to contribute something to that fight. Then whatever is going to happen, it’s going to happen.”

From Mother Jones via this RSS feed