Supreme Court Strips Protections for Haitian & Syrian Immigrants in “Racially Inflected” Decision

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“Thousands of Haitians and Syrians living in the United States are newly at risk of deportation after the Supreme Court ruled to allow the Trump administration to strip them of “temporary protected status,” or TPS. The program, designed for foreign citizens of countries the U.S. government believes are too unstable or dangerous to be returned to, often due to natural disasters or war, has been a major target of attack by the Trump administration and its anti-immigrant agenda.

“We are looking at the catastrophic deficit in the workforce in the United States if we allow this deportation machine and cruelty to take effect,” our guest, Haitian Bridge Alliance’s Guerline Jozef, says.

“This is just part of the Trump administration’s efforts to feed the detention and deportation machine and essentially halt immigration,” adds Lupe Aguirre of the International Refugee Assistance Project. “It’s about maintaining their campaign promises to root out people that they see as undesirable.”

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González, as we move into a second major decision on immigration the Supreme Court handed down yesterday, which, interestingly, is actually linked to devastating natural disasters like took place in Venezuela.

The Supreme Court ruled in another 6-to-3 decision that the Trump administration can strip away protected status from 350,000 Haitian immigrants and 6,100 Syrian immigrants who have been living and working lawfully in the United States under temporary protected status, known as TPS, the program designed for foreign citizens of countries the U.S. government believes are too unstable or dangerous to be returned to, often due to natural disasters or war. The loss of TPS will put hundreds of thousands of people at risk for deportation.

This is Guerline Jozef, co-founder of the Haitian Bridge Alliance, speaking yesterday.

GUERLINE JOZEF: Yes, today hurts. But we will continue to fight on behalf of the 1.3 million TPS holders from 17 countries. Today it is Haiti and Syria. Tomorrow is Venezuela, Nicaragua and others. So, together, we say no to injustice, and we must make sure that we as a country stand on the right side of history.

AMY GOODMAN: White House senior aide Stephen Miller, who is seen as the architect of the president’s deportation agenda, took questions from reporters after the ruling came down.

REPORTER: Does the administration consider Haiti a safe country?

STEPHEN MILLER: For Haitians? Absolutely.

REPORTER: For Haitians.

STEPHEN MILLER: Yes.

REPORTER: Despite the [inaudible]? Despite the —

STEPHEN MILLER: Yes. So, for — I mean, Haitians live in Haiti. It’s not our position that Haitians should leave Haiti. I mean, it would be — it’d be crazy for us to say that Haitians couldn’t live in Haiti. It’s their country. Of course Haitians should live in Haiti.

AMY GOODMAN: The case is Mullin v. Doe. The conservative majority ruled the Supreme Court lacked authority to review how the president or Department of Homeland Security used their authority on TPS. He also rejected the idea that racial prejudice was involved in the decision for Haitians.

In her dissent for the liberal minority, Justice Elena Kagan said it was, quote, “plain to see” that race played a role, writing, quote, “The evidence … includes statements by the President so repellent and racially inflected that the majority declines to put them in print.”

For more, we’re joined by two guests: Guerline Jozef, co-founder and executive director of Haitian Bridge Alliance, joining us from Washington, D.C., where she held the news conference yesterday, and with us in New York is Lupe Aguirre, deputy director of U.S. Litigation, International Refugee Assistance Project.

Guerline, let’s begin with you. Respond to the decision and what this means.

GUERLINE JOZEF: Thank you so much, Amy.

As I mentioned several times yesterday, the community was devastated, but we continue to make sure we push through. These decisions literally means that we have over 350,000 Haitians and 6,000 Syrians whose lives are in the balance, at risk of deportation, family separation, detention, cruel situations where we are continuing to see, knowing the conditions on the ground. And the narrative that the government is using against the community, we know very well that it is truly based on racial slur, that, again, we continue to see happening even after the SCOTUS decision yesterday. That’s why we continue to push in asking the Senate to uphold and vote in favor of extending TPS for three years for Haitians. That is currently on the floor of the Senate.

But the reality is that the decision yesterday is devastating. I cannot tell you how many people have been calling, not knowing what tomorrow will bring. “Are we going to be deported? What will happen to my children?” We have people who have been in the United States for over 10, 15, 20 years, that have been able to not only support themselves, give back to the United States, but also supporting those back at home for the past 10 and 15 years.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Guerline, in terms of the impact in the United States itself, there are estimates that as many as one-third of Haitian TPS holders work in the U.S. healthcare system. If all of these folks in the next few months or a year are suddenly declared no longer documented and can’t work, the impact that that might have on the U.S. healthcare system, that’s being completely ignored in this, isn’t it?

GUERLINE JOZEF: We have been talking to several hospitals, healthcare providers, and they tell us that they are afraid that the workforce will be eliminated. Currently, as you mentioned, one-third of the Haitian TPS holders are our healthcare givers. They are in the hospitals. They are in the home healthcare, in addition to understanding in places like Mississippi and Ohio, where they continue to not only invest in the communities where they have been able to live peacefully with their neighbors, going to church, but we have industries — the healthcare industry, the hospitality industry, the meat-packing industry, also the farmworkers also be a part of that. We are looking at the catastrophic deficit in the workforce in the United States if we allow this deportation machine and cruelty to take effect, based on what we are seeing right now.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to go to a Syrian TPS holder, member of the LGBTQcommunity, who submitted an anonymous audio recording to the International Refugee Assistance Program, IRAP, in response to the Supreme Court ruling.

SYRIAN TPS HOLDER: When I’ve heard the Supreme Court’s ruling this morning, I’ve been just, honestly, going around in circles since then, feeling anxious, scared and, honestly, confused about what might come ahead. With the reality of going back to Syria being closer than ever, I just don’t know. The Middle East is up in flames. Syria has just came out of a five-decade dictatorship, and it’s more unstable than ever. So, not only I’m facing the possibility of most likely facing all sorts of violence, from mental to physical and sexual, and I have to hide my identity once again, but I’m losing the things I have come to appreciate here in the U.S., things that I would tell everyone are things that you would consider normal, as simple as, quite literally, just living in peace with others, feeling supported by your own community. So I just tell that to everyone. Don’t only think about TPS holders, but, rather, the ripple effect that this will have amongst Americans and everyone here, on the economy, on the psyche of society here.

AMY GOODMAN: So, Lupe Aguirre, deputy director of the U.S. Litigation, International Refugee Assistance Program, IRAP, can you respond to this audio message?

LUPE AGUIRRE: Absolutely. First, I just want to comment on the strength and courage and resiliency of all the TPS holders from various countries. But what he said is absolutely right. There are ramifications beyond the TPScommunity, ramifications that will impact the U.S. society, our healthcare industries, our economies. We have one plaintiff who is a highly sought-after doctor that patients travel miles to see. But that didn’t matter to the Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court held, regardless of whether the government is following the scriptures of the TPS law, that we have no — the federal courts have no review power over that decision-making. And that’s absolutely the wrong and immoral decision. They chose ideology over our promise — our rule of law and our promise to provide refuge to people who are seeking safety.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Lupe, I wanted to ask you — the Trump administration is constantly saying that they are — they are directing their dragnets around immigration to the worst of the worst, the criminals. But in reality, what has been happening here is a total 180-degree turn on U.S. policy toward immigration in general, because we’re talking not just about the refugee system, the reductions there, the attacks on TPS, the increased fees, almost a doubling of the fees for people just to apply to become U.S. citizens, or visa fees. It’s an attempt to completely shut the country off from legal immigration, not just from undocumented immigration. I’m wondering your thoughts about that.

LUPE AGUIRRE: That’s absolutely correct. This is just part of the Trump administration’s efforts to feed the detention and deportation machine and essentially halt immigration, even when people follow the rules, apply, are vetted consistently, as they have been under the TPS laws. And so, it is not about — it’s about maintaining their campaign promises to root out people that they see as undesirable, even though they are valuable contributors to our society.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you both very much. Of course, we’ll continue to follow the effects of this. Lupe Aguirre, deputy director, U.S. Litigation, International Refugee Assistance Project, or IRAP. And I also want to thank Guerline Jozef, co-founder and executive director of the Haitian Bridge Alliance.

Coming up, we will look at the Supreme Court blocking thousands of cancer patients from suing Bayer over the weed killer Roundup. Stay with us.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: “Bad Monsanto” by the late folksinger Michael Hurley, performing in our Democracy Now! studio.“

 

Anti-ICE organizers shift focus to defend democracy from Trump assault

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“Minnesota residents, who organized to resist Trump’s immigration crackdown, are now preparing to defend democracy against potential election interference. They are conducting democracy defense trainings, encouraging voter turnout, and planning to respond to any attacks on the election process. The trainings emphasize the importance of community organization and preparedness in safeguarding democratic processes.

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Citizens in Minnesota using lessons learned from migrant crackdown to protect elections from president’s threats

Rachel Leingang

In this February picture, activists in Minnesota demand justice for Minneapolis and its immigrants, and for the departure of ICE. Photograph: NurPhoto/Getty Images

When thousands of immigration agents flooded Minnesota earlier this year, a loose network of neighbors sprang into action. They fed each other. They got kids to and from school safely. They tracked the surge that tore through their communities.

After organizing, block by block, to monitor Donald Trump’s extraordinary crackdown on their state, the same neighbors are shifting their focus to a different threat. What if the US president tries to steal an election?

Defending democracy can feel abstract – almost theoretical – until it is required. But a controversial, aggressive and deadly deployment of federal agents felt like a distant prospect on the streets of Minnesota, too, until the president ordered Operation Metro Surge.

With November’s midterm elections approaching, one of the groups that taught Minnesotans to document immigration enforcement has now launched democracy defense trainings, encouraging people to knock on every neighbor’s door to help them vote and, if need be, respond to attacks on the election.

“There is a general, very visceral concern that this administration is planning to ensure that the elections go their way by any means necessary,” said Jess, who trained about 2,500 people on constitutional observation across dozens of lessons during the immigration crackdown.

Jess, a former federal worker who was fired during Elon Musk’s so-called “department of government efficiency” drive last year, asked to use her first name only for fear of retaliation.

‘Basic stuff’

Dozens of neighbors poured into a stuffy Minnesota church basement on a steamy Tuesday evening in June, finding their seats on tables marked with the geographical area where they live.

They had lived through an assault by the Trump administration on the state which killed two local residents and deported many hundreds more.

They knew to take Trump’s threats seriously. They wanted to learn how they could protect elections.

“We’ve got to make sure that everybody who wants to vote can vote, and everybody’s vote is counted, and those votes and the will of the majority is respected,” said David Brauer, who helped lead the training for Monarca, a project of social justice group Unidos MN.

“Basic stuff, but so crucial right now. But that’s just the first step. Once they’re cast, we know we’ll have to defend them.”

The training is designed to get citizens thinking about what Trump and his allies could do to undermine the voting process and election results. The exercises are theoretical, for now, but based on reality: the president has already sought to undermine the results of California’s elections and said they will be investigated, a sign of more to come in the midterms.

Defending democracy, aside from voting, is often seen as the work of elections officials who count and confirm vote totals, or of nonprofits that file lawsuits over restrictive voting laws. Officials in some states have worked to put laws in place to try to fend off federal overreach. They’re beefing up election security measures and solidifying processes to inform the public of how elections work, anticipating misinformation coming from the White House, like it did in California’s recent primaries.

Students from St Paul public schools protest at an anti-ICE walkout in January. Photograph: Star Tribune/Getty Images

But in an era of explicit partisan gerrymandering that diminishes voting power for Black people, and of a president who frequently denies the results of election which don’t go his way, defending democracy requires all hands on deck.

Advocates of the block-by-block strategy say it helps keep eyes on election processes. After all, people vote by precinct – where they live.

In 2020, when Trump and his allies sought to overturn the results of the presidential election he lost to Joe Biden, institutional guardrails held: then vice-president Mike Pence did not halt congressional proceedings that confirmed the results, and pressure on state officials to impede their results largely did not work.

Times have changed, though. Trump has filled his government with loyalists, and there’s a growing apprehension that institutional protections may not hold.

In Minnesota, the president’s threats carry weight. Organizing within the community can feel daunting. People are burnt out after months of day-to-day activism. They worry about how the administration could seek to criminalize their activities. (The Department of Justice has charged nearly 40 people over a protest at a church, and another 15 more with broad conspiracy charges for their responses to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, not to mention the hundreds detained and deported from the state.)

Protect Democracy, a nonprofit that advocates against authoritarianism, called the charges against the anti-ICE activists one sign of how the administration could seek to undermine the vote this year. It’s part of a “disrupt” strategy that seeks to deploy federal power against opponents, the group said after the charges against the 15 Minnesotans were filed.

“The Department of Justice is attempting to intimidate critics and punish those who organize to expose the administration’s abuses,” said Jess Marsden, Protect Democracy’s counsel and director of impact programs. “They know how much easier it is to tilt the electoral playing field if people stay home and stay quiet, which is why it’s important to name these abuses now, push back against attacks, and prepare for additional action ahead of November.”

‘What do you do?’

The democracy defense trainings started in Minnesota in late April. Already hundreds have signed up, according to Luis Argueta Jr, communications director of Unidos MN, who said he is not aware of similar ground-level trainings elsewhere in the country. He has been hearing from groups in other states, though, curious about how the sessions are going.

On the night of the training at the suburban church, there were trainings at four other locations in the Twin Cities, Argueta said. Word of mouth has spread among community groups, just like it did around the previoustrainings on constitutional observing.

Attacks on democracy have been a “continuous concern”, with people routinely worried about immigration agents at the polls, Argueta said. He’s heard fear from newly naturalized citizens, in particular, over voting, including a concern that if they vote, their loved ones who are not naturalized could be somehow exposed.

While the bulk of immigration agents left the state, some people have remained fearful of harassment or detention if they leave, he said. A plan to convert a private prison into a detention facility amplified worry again, as did additional apprehensions this summer throughout the state.

“So, what do you do?” Argueta said. “Do you sit around and wait and hope that nothing happens, or do you start building something, do you start organizing and making sure that people are able to actually step up and defend?”

In the church basement, Brauer told the crowd that they, like him, might be a “checklist person”, who wants to simply check off five tasks and then win democracy. That’s not how it works, he said. The purpose of the training is not to solve the fundamental problems of democracy, but to get organized and have a plan to respond to whatever the Trump administration throws at it.

Volunteers attend a training for Monarca. Photograph: Unidos MN 

The audience shared with each other what made them proud of Minnesota during the federal occupation, and what democracy defense meant to them. It was motivating and empowering to see people move outside their comfort zone, one attender said, even if they were nervous or scared. They would need to embrace discomfort again to defend democracy.

‘As many people as possible’

Threats to elections are already playing out. Louisiana threw out tens of thousands of votes in order to redraw maps to dilute Black voting power.Republican leaders have said they want to see immigration agents or troops at polling places. The federal government has seized ballots in Georgia as part of an endless quest to prove fraud in the 2020 election.

But what defending democracy could look like on the ground isn’t exactly clear yet. It could be get-out-the-vote efforts that ensure your neighbors have a ride to the polls. It could be signing up to work as election judges, or sitting near your polling place to monitor whether immigration agents show up. It could be protesting or lobbying local officials if they face pressure to undermine the vote. It could be anticipating larger threats to the election.

All of these conversations could come up on a neighbor’s doorstep when they’re asked what they’d be willing to do if someone tries to attack the vote.

The group worked through a scenario to figure out what they could do to defend the vote. In the theoretical exercise, the Department of Justice announced in August 2026 that – in order for people’s votes to be counted –voters needed to appear on newly issued federal voter rolls, resulting in confusing messages just before early voting began.

What should we do, a trainer asked the audience, and how would an organized network allow them to respond effectively to the threat?

One person from the audience said there was no way the federal government could move that fast – a natural reaction, the trainer noted, because people want to argue away the threat. Another said they would get loud, and make sure Minnesota’s elected leaders did the same.

Emilia González Avalos, executive director of Unidos MN, acknowledged that these conversations with neighbors can be difficult, especially if there are outward indicators that you might disagree politically, but there is value in “breaking down the dehumanization amongst us as an exercise of power building”.

The strength built block by block will be reflected to defend access to the polls, she said, and ensure results are ratified.

“We don’t need perfect leaders,” she said. “We just need a regular person that can take responsibility of something, anything, whether it’s a smaller block or a small floor in a building, that’s fine, but take responsibility of something. We need as many people as possible right now.”

 

‘It’s dangerous and it’s going to erode trust’: redesign of US government websites stokes surveillance fears

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“The National Design Studio (NDS), a White House office led by Joe Gebbia and staffed by former Doge employees, has been quietly redesigning sensitive federal websites. The NDS’s approach, including the use of commercial tracking software and bypassing normal federal oversight, raises concerns about privacy, transparency, and potential misuse of data. The studio’s operations, funding, and contracting arrangements remain largely opaque, further fueling these concerns.

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The National Design Studio, staffed by Doge veterans, installed visitor-tracking software on vital federal websites

Jason Wilson

Joe Gebbia, co-founder of Airbnb and the chief design officer of the National Design Studio, at the unveiling of the TrumpRx drug discount site on 5 February 2026. Photograph: Aaron Schwartz/CNP/Bloomberg via Getty Images

An opaque White House office staffed largely by veterans of Elon Musk’s “department of government efficiency” (Doge) has quietly rebuilt some of the federal government’s most sensitive websites – for passport applications, voter registration, prescription-drug pricing and children’s savings – in ways critics say appear to violate federal law.

The National Design Studio (NDS) was established by a Donald Trumpexecutive order last August, and is led by Trump-aligned Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia and staffed by Doge veterans.

A Guardian investigation has found the office has apparently been developing or redeveloping sensitive federal websites, including those connecting Americans with prescription drugs, children’s savings accounts, passports and voter registration. The investigation corroborates and advances earlier reporting by the Drey Dossier, a YouTube investigative outlet.

The NDS built and now operates four public federal websites: ndstudio.gov, trumprx.gov, realfood.gov and trumpaccounts.gov. All four ran commercial visitor-tracking software, configured to evade the privacy tools many web users install, and none carry the public filings federal privacy law requires under laws including the Privacy Act of 1974 and the E-Government Act of 2002.

Separately, none of the NDS’s spending or its arrangements with outside vendors appears in USAspending, the federal contracting database, raising questions about how it is funded and overseen.

Separately, the NDS has also built and runs White House-controlled versions of services the US Congress assigned to other federal agencies, including a passport-application portal that bypasses the state department’s existing site, and a copy of voter-registration site vote.gov.

Combined, the sites route sensitive interactions Americans have with their government through infrastructure the White House apparently controls, and outside the reporting and accountability systems that normally cover federal agencies.

Analysis of the underlying source code for four of the websites found that on at least two of them, the studio installed a commercial tool called PostHogthat closely tracks what every visitor does on the site. Another tool, apparently made in-house, sends user data to a destination that is not visible on the public internet.

The NDS apparently removed this tracking software after the Guardian reached out to the White House with a detailed series of questions on the NDS’s operations on 4 June. On 17 June, White House spokesperson Liz Huston responded: “All National Design Studio personnel comply with all legal requirements in their important work to improve how citizens interact with their government.”

The studio has also built versions of services legally assigned to other agencies, including a passports website, and a copy of Login.gov, the gateway more than 150 million Americans use to sign in to federal services, the latter reportedly being overseen by a former Doge engineer who moved to the studio.

The NDS has also apparently built a copy of vote.gov, the federal voter-registration site that by law belongs to an independent bipartisan commission inside a website site only accessible with a White House login.

A federal voter-registration system run from inside the White House, with identity and citizenship checks routed through systems the administration controls, could let an incumbent see who is registering, or check their registration, in the weeks before an election.

Public ownership records maintained by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (Cisa) list the executive office of the president as the registrant of the studio’s sites, including passports.gov and the vote.gov copy, meaning that the office controls the domains. Questions remain about the sort of access that this could give the White House to voter registration data.

John Davisson, senior counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), said the studio’s approach risked creating a second version “a whole sort of second skunk-works version of the federal government with all these shady tracking technologies and outside of the parameters of normal federal privacy laws”.

A skunk works is a figurative term for an experimental department within a larger organization with freedom to operate outside normal procedure.

The Guardian sent a detailed list of questions about the NDS to the White House Press Office for the attention of Gebbia and the White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles, who has oversight of the studio. Separately, the Guardian sent a request to Gebbia’s presumed email at the NDS (no addresses are publicly listed). There was no response.

The National Design Studio

Donald Trump created the NDS by executive order on 21 August 2025, ostensibly to overhaul federal websites and digital services. The office sits within the executive office of the president as a “temporary organization”, a designation that places it outside the Senate confirmation process, outside the financial disclosure system applied to most federal appointees and outside the inspector general’s jurisdiction, which covers cabinet departments.

The studio is staffed under the same hiring authority that ran Doge. The studio’s spending, and any contracts it holds with outside vendors, do not appear in the federal contracting database USAspending or in any other public-facing record of US government spending.

Gebbia, who became a multibillionaire after co-founding Airbnb, leads the office as chief design officer of the United States. He stepped back from any daily role at Airbnb in 2022, and joined the Tesla board that September.

Gebbia had reportedly been a “longtime Democratic donor” but in a lengthy January 2025 X post said that he had voted for Trump, casting the about-turn as a response to “living in the eggshell ages of these last few years. A time of silence, shaming, and fear, where calling a duck a duck meant you hated ducks”. Since then he has leaned into his support for rightwing causes, and also made a $2m donation to a Super PAC supporting Andrew Cuomo in his unsuccessful face-off against then candidate for New York mayor Zohran Mamdani.

In April 2025, he stepped down as chair of the board at airbnb.org, the company’s affiliated non-profit, following backlash to his taking a role at Doge.

Joe Gebbia speaks during an event to unveil the TrumpRx drug discount site in Washington DC on 5 February 2026. Photograph: Al Drago/Reuters

Gebbia spent about six months at Doge in the first half of 2025, leading an initiative to digitise federal retirement records held at Iron Mountain for the federal office of personnel management. The executive order that created the role said that the office would be supported by an administrator who reports directly to White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles.

At least two other figures with Doge backgrounds work alongside him. Greg Hogan moved to the studio and, according to Drey Dossier reporting, was put in charge of Login.gov.

Akash Bobba, one of Musk’s original six Doge engineers, also apparently moved to the studio. His NDS email address is listed in the Cisa federal .gov registry as the security contact for the United States African Development Foundation, an agency unrelated to the studio’s stated mandate.

While there is very little transparency about NDS staffing, several photos and one video on the NDS website appear to depict as an employee Edward “Big Balls” Coristine, an early Doge employee who allegedly exposed the social security data of hundreds of millions of Americans on the way to becoming a pop culture punchline.

The studio’s funding and contracting arrangements are similarly opaque. A search of USAspending returns no record of the National Design Studio either as a paying agency or as a recipient of funds.

There is no public record of how the studio pays its developers, PostHog or any of the other commercial services its sites use. The hiring authority the studio operates under keeps its staff roster off the financial-disclosure system that covers most federal appointees, and the executive office of the president, which houses it, has no inspector general.

PostHog

The use of commercial tools on the sites departs from federal web-team conventions. Davisson, the senior counsel at the EPIC, described the studio’s work as “trying to establish their own sort of fly-by-night version of what federal agencies normally do with added tracking technologies and less oversight”.

This is most apparent in the NDS’s employment of user tracking prior to outreach from the Guardian, such that when a member of the public visited one of the studio’s federal websites, a commercial tool called PostHog recorded what they did on the page.

PostHog’s session-recording feature, which can replay every click, scroll and keystroke of a visitor’s time on a webpage, is installed in the code of all four sites and enabled on two of them. On the remaining two, the recording is held inactive only by a single setting inside PostHog’s dashboard, which can be changed by whoever controls the website at any time.

The Guardian emailed PostHog for comment on its apparent provision of tracking tools to the NDS, but received no response.

Adblockers and similar privacy tools are used by millions of people to limit what third parties can learn about them as they browse. Most of them work by intercepting requests that a visitor’s browser makes to known tracking services – and blocking them before any data leaves the device.

Website source code shows that PostHog has been configured on NDS-run sites to route analytics requests through an address on the federal website itself, rather than through PostHog’s own servers. Because the request appears to go to the site the user is already visiting, rather than to a recognisable third-party address, adblockers don’t flag it.

As PostHog explains in its own documentation, this works “because ad blockers haven’t visited your domain to catalog your setup. They don’t know what to block.” In other words, the technique is specifically designed to evade privacy tools – by presenting commercial tracking as ordinary website activity.

Serge Egelman, research director of the Usable Security and Privacy Group at the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI), explained: “The issue there is that over the last several years, due to abuses relating to this type of data collection, there’s basically an arms race with tools being released to allow consumers to try and exert some control over what data gets collected.”

Egelman said that he had not looked specifically at the PostHog tool or its deployment on federal websites, but he did point to a lawsuit involving the addition of commercial tracking technology to a state government website.

“I testified on Meta where the [Meta] Pixel was put on the California DMV website. And Meta was able to obtain information about when people are requesting, say, disability placards, reinstating a suspended license, things like that – sensitive information that’s actually protected by federal law.”

He added: “It’s not like someone going to the DMV website expects a private company to receive their personal data and then be allowed to use that however they want.”

PostHog comes with a separate feature called session recording, which plays back every click, scroll and keystroke a visitor makes, like a video recording of their entire visit. Princeton University researchers who first documented the technology in 2017 wrote that watching such a recording was “as if someone is looking over your shoulder”.

On the Trump Accounts and TrumpRX websites, the feature has been built into the page code and is held inactive only by a single setting inside PostHog’s dashboard. The NDS can turn it on at any time, on either site, without making changes in the underlying website code.

Separately, until the Guardian sought comment on this reporting, the NDS’s own website, ndstudio.gov, ran a 539-line piece of bespoke code that recorded visitors’ clicks, form entries and navigation; assigned each visitor a session identifier; and forwarded the captured data to an address that does not appear anywhere on the public internet. The script’s source code refers to it as AutoMonitor.

A 2002 federal law, the E-Government Act, requires any federal agency that collects personal information through a website to first publish a written privacy impact assessment explaining what it collects and where the information goes. The Privacy Act of 1974 requires a separate, parallel public notice, a “system of records notice”, describing the records the agency keeps. A 2010 office of management and budget memorandum extended both requirements to federal agencies’ use of commercial web-tracking tools, including the kind that PostHog provides.

The Guardian could find no such filings for the studio’s web-tracking layer. None of the four sites carry a privacy impact assessment naming PostHog or describing the IP addresses and on-site activity the tool collects. None of the four are covered by a system of records notice that addresses what is collected or where it goes.

The one published privacy instrument that relates to any of the four programmes, a treasury notice for the Trump Accounts programme, describes how the children’s-investment programme is administered but does not name PostHog and does not describe the tracking on trumpaccounts.gov at all.

Davisson, the EPIC attorney, called the studio’s failure to publish such a notice “a pretty clearcut violation of section 208” of the E-Government Act, adding: “There’s just no suggestion that they’re trying to comply in good faith with any of their obligations when it comes to the collection of personal information.”

It’s not known what data was collected from users of the government websites while the tools were live, whether it was retained and who has custody of the data.

Vote.gov

Some of the NDS’s work is even more opaque, including an apparent redesign of the federal government’s voting registration hub.

A sign-in page run by the studio on a White House-controlled web address carries the title “Log in to vote.gov preview”. Above the password field is a notice: “For official use only. Actions will be recorded in accordance with applicable law.”

Vote.gov is a federal voter registration website. By law it belongs to the Election Assistance Commission (EAC), an independent, bipartisan body that Congress established in 2002 after the disputed 2000 election. Congress created the commission specifically so no sitting president would control the federal voter-registration system.

The studio’s version has been live on White House systems since 17 September 2025, according to public records of secure web addresses.

Late last year, the NDS began presenting its system to state election directors.

The first such briefing, on 17 October, was on a call of the National Association of State Election Directors (NASED). Call notes summarising the meeting record members representing states of both parties expressing“serious concerns with this project not complying with state law” and noting that “the developers do not seem to want to spend the time to understand election official concerns”.

Brianna Schletz, the Election Assistance Commission’s executive director, reportedly told state directors on the same call that the conversations were “informal”, and that commissioners would later vote on whether to stay involved. No record of any such vote has since appeared in the commission’s public proceedings.

Asked for comment by the Guardian, a NASED spokesperson, Amy Cohen, confirmed by email that “NASED held a call in October joined by representatives from the National Design Studio and members of the EAC leadership team”.

Cohen added: “NASED does not have a position on this project. NASED has had no further communication with the National Design Studio on this or any other project; both NASED as an organization and our members in their individual capacities engage with the EAC regularly about a variety of different topics and projects.”

Six days after the 17 October meeting, on 23 October, a National Design Studio engineer, Akash Bobba, reportedly briefed the system on a recorded conference call organised by the National Association of Secretaries of State. Under the studio’s design, voters would be required to verify their identity through Login.gov, the federal sign-in gateway, and to have their citizenship checked against a database run by the Department of Homeland Security.

Asked on the call what the federal government would retain of the personal information voters entered into the system, Bobba reportedly said that “clear data retention policies” would be given to states ahead of implementation, but conceded: “I don’t know what they retain and what they are logging.”

The Election Assistance Commission has been part of the discussions. Its chair, Donald Palmer, reportedly said the commission was “facilitating discussion with state election officials on modernizing an accessible tool to provide a verifiable digital registration option”.

The Guardian contacted the Election Assistance Commission for comment but received no response.

The EPIC’s Davisson said: “With vote.gov, that’s the province of the Election Assistance Commission. But if you’re centralizing that in the White House, the White House is going to have sort of access to that backbone of data.

He added: “Doing that outside of the appropriate channels, I think, is definitely going to – it’s dangerous and it’s going to erode trust.”

The Help America Vote Act of 2002 put voter-registration administration under an independent bipartisan commission, structurally outside the reach of any sitting president. The studio’s version appears to collapse this arm’s-length arrangement.

The Guardian has not seen what is on the other side of the sign-in, but published Cisa records show who runs the system it lives on, which is under White House control. The commission Congress put in charge of vote.gov has not decided to formally participate in the initiative. The build itself is on White House systems.

Passports and money

The studio has also built or taken control of websites that belong, by law or by convention, to other federal agencies. The sites handle some of the most sensitive personal information Americans give to the government.

Passports.gov is now run from inside the White House, not from the state department. The state department operates US passport services through its existing site at travel.state.gov. The studio’s version collects identity information from people applying for passports. It carries no privacy notice. Developer test code was left running on the live page.

In response to a request for comment, a state department spokesperson wrote: “The Department of State is working closely with the White House to deliver the best possible service for our passport customers while safeguarding US national security.”

The General Services Administration building in Washington DC on 24 February 2025. Photograph: Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images

They added: “US passport books and passport cards – and the programs and websites that support them – represent the gold standard in secure international travel documents, underpinned by state-of-the-art security and technology.”

They referred additional questions to the White House.

Trumpaccounts.gov is the federal website for the children’s investment programme created in last summer’s tax legislation. The treasury department, which administers the programme, is the registrant of record for the site. But the site itself runs through the same White House-controlled commercial account as the studio’s own sites: ndstudio.gov, the prescription-drug site trumprx.gov, the food-policy site realfood.gov and others. The treasury department did not respond to a request for comment.

Login.gov is the federal sign-in gateway that more than 150 million Americans use to access services from social security to tax filing. The studio’s preview of vote.gov, described in the previous section, uses Login.gov to verify the identities of visitors.

The Guardian contacted the General Services Administration (GSA), which operates Login.gov, for comment.

A spokesperson replied in an email: “Login.gov is committed to the highest standards of privacy, transparency, and security. Our Privacy Impact Assessment was most recently reviewed in March 2026. All personnel supporting Login.gov, including detailees, are required to comply with applicable GSA policies, security requirements, privacy controls, and governance processes.”

The NDS, meanwhile, seems to be expanding its footprint across more government websites.

In late May, three new addresses tied to the NDS appeared in the public records: chat.staging.ndstudio.gov, onboarding.ndstudio.gov and upload.ndstudio.gov.“