If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. A federal judge has ruled that the federal government likely violated the First Amendment when it strong-armed Apple and Facebook into deleting tools that let the public track ICE activity. The preliminary injunction, issued by Judge Jorge L. Alonso of the Northern District of Illinois, halts the government’s coercion of the platforms and lets the creators of the “ICE Sightings – Chicagoland” Facebook group and the Eyes Up app move forward with their case. We obtained a copy of the order for you here. The plaintiffs are Kassandra Rosado, who ran the Facebook group from her Chicago small business community, and Kreisau Group, which built the Eyes Up app to archive video evidence of government activity. Both projects collected publicly available information about ICE operations. Both were deleted within hours of senior federal officials publicly demanding their removal. Alonso’s opinion treats what happened here as the textbook case of indirect censorship the Supreme Court warned about in last year’s NRA v. Vullo decision. Officials with no direct regulatory authority over a speaker can still silence that speaker by leaning on the intermediaries who carry the speech. That’s what the judge found here. Former Attorney General Pam Bondi and former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem didn’t pass a law or issue a subpoena. They made demands, took credit for the deletions, and dropped reminders that prosecution was on the table. Apple independently reviewed Eyes Up in August 2025, knew what the app did, and approved it. On October 2, Bondi told Fox News that “We reached out to Apple today demanding they remove the ICEBlock app from their App Store – and Apple did so.” Around the same date, Apple removed Eyes Up along with ICEBlock and Red Dot, now citing a rule against “mean-spirited content” that had somehow not applied to the same app a month earlier. The Facebook deletion followed the same pattern. Rosado’s group had nearly 100,000 members by October 2025, most of them small business owners and neighbors sharing information as ICE ran an enforcement surge called “Operation Midway Blitz” through Chicago. Of thousands of posts and tens of thousands of comments, Facebook’s own moderators had flagged five items across the group’s entire existence. Facebook told Rosado at the time that these were member violations that “don’t hurt your group” and that groups don’t get disabled unless moderators themselves produce or approve prohibited content. Alonso wasn’t subtle about what the officials’ public statements signaled to the platforms. He quoted Noem’s warning that “We will prosecute those who dox our agents to the fullest extent of the law” alongside her demand that Facebook be “PROACTIVE” in policing such content. He quoted Bondi’s line that “We’re not going to stop at just arresting the violent criminals we can see in the streets.” The judge called these “thinly veiled threats” and reached back to the Supreme Court’s 1963 Bantam Books decision for the point that “People do not lightly disregard public officers’ thinly veiled threats to institute criminal proceedings against them if they do not come around.” The government didn’t need to write a censorship law because it had access to a phone. Apple and Facebook both run highly regulated businesses with enormous legal exposure. When the Attorney General says she wants content gone, the cost of saying no runs through antitrust review, DOJ investigations, and future cooperation with federal agencies. The platforms did what rational risk-averse companies do under that kind of pressure. They deleted the speech and invoked vague content rules to dress it up as their own decision. The Apple “mean-spirited content” rationale is the clearest example of how those vague rules function in this environment. Guideline 1.1.1 covers whatever Apple decides it covers on a given day. In August, Eyes Up met the guideline. In October, after Bondi called, it didn’t. Nothing about the app had changed. What changed was who was watching and what they could do to Apple if the app stayed up. Courts have held for decades that filming and documenting police activity in public is protected First Amendment speech. Alonso cited rulings from the First, Third, Fifth, Seventh, Ninth, Tenth, and Eleventh Circuits all reaching the same conclusion. Warning neighbors about law enforcement operations, recording agents in public, and collecting that footage into a shared archive are the kind of activities the First Amendment was designed to shelter. The government’s workaround here was to avoid the First Amendment by outsourcing the deletion to a private company that the government could hurt. Alonso rejected the workaround. He found that the plaintiffs’ injury was traceable to government coercion rather than platform discretion, pointing to three facts in sequence. Facebook and Apple had already reviewed and approved the content. They reversed course immediately after officials contacted them. The officials then publicly claimed credit for the reversals. That’s enough of a pattern, the judge ruled, to support a finding that the platforms were responding to federal pressure rather than exercising independent judgment. FIRE, which represents Rosado and Kreisau Group, is defending the case. The organization said it was “extremely encouraged by this ruling” and that “Even though it’s not the end of the case, it bodes well for the future of our legal fight to ensure that the First Amendment protects the right to discuss, record, and criticize what law enforcement does in public.” The case is now styled Rosado v. Blanche after Todd Blanche replaced Bondi as Acting Attorney General and Markwayne Mullin replaced Noem at DHS. The preliminary injunction stops federal officials from continuing to pressure platforms to delete the plaintiffs’ content. It does not, by itself, force Apple or Facebook to restore the app or the group. That decision sits with the companies, which now have legal cover to say yes where they previously had political cover to say no. The chilling effect question hangs over what comes next. The Eyes Up app has been unavailable on the App Store for more than six months. The Chicagoland Facebook group’s nearly 100,000 members have been scattered across other platforms or dropped out of the conversation entirely. Whatever happens at trial, the government’s demand achieved its immediate purpose for half a year. The speech stopped. The information didn’t circulate. The people who relied on it had to find other ways to share what they saw, or stop looking. The ruling is important as precedent because the jawboning tactic it addresses has become routine across administrations. Both parties have developed the habit of treating Silicon Valley moderation teams as an extension of federal policy, using public pressure and backchannel calls to accomplish what direct regulation couldn’t. The asymmetry with Murthy v. Missouri deserves careful attention, because the procedural parallels cut against any easy story about the two cases. Rosado is a preliminary injunction at the district court. Alonso ruled that the plaintiffs are likely to succeed on the merits, which is a lower bar than actually winning. The case still has to survive motions to dismiss, discovery, summary judgment, and likely an appeal before anything here is settled as law. That procedural posture is exactly where Missouri v. Biden was in July 2023, when Judge Terry Doughty of the Western District of Louisiana issued his own preliminary injunction against the Biden administration. That case was brought by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana, along with several individual plaintiffs, including epidemiologists and journalists, challenging the White House, Surgeon General, CDC, FBI, and other federal agencies for pressuring social media platforms to suppress speech about COVID-19 origins, vaccine side effects, the Hunter Biden laptop story, and election integrity claims. Doughty’s ruling was broader than Alonso’s and more broad in its language, calling the Biden-era pressure campaign “arguably the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history.” It barred a long list of federal officials and agencies from communicating with platforms about content moderation. It looked, at the time, like a decisive win for the plaintiffs challenging government jawboning. That preliminary injunction didn’t survive. The Fifth Circuit narrowed it significantly, keeping the core finding of coercion but trimming the list of officials covered and the scope of prohibited conduct. The Supreme Court then vacated what remained on standing grounds in Murthy, without ever reaching the merits of whether the Biden administration’s conduct violated the First Amendment. The entire structure of relief that the district court had put in place collapsed through the appellate process. That’s the procedural shape Rosado is likely to face if the government appeals. A district court has issued a preliminary injunction on a record that looks strong to the judge who heard it. The Seventh Circuit will get its turn, and the Supreme Court could get its turn after that. Murthy’s standing doctrine, which required plaintiffs to prove their specific injuries were traceable to specific government pressure rather than independent platform judgment, applies to Rosado just as much as it applied to its predecessor. Whether Alonso’s three-part traceability analysis holds up at higher courts is genuinely uncertain. The records in the two cases have real differences but they point in the same direction. Missouri v. Biden had extensive discovery showing a sustained institutional pressure campaign against online speech Biden said was getting people killed. White House digital director Rob Flaherty wrote to Facebook that the platform was a “top driver of vaccine hesitancy,” demanded the removal of parody accounts and vaccine humor posts, and asked the company to throttle specific content from Tucker Carlson and the New York Post. Press Secretary Jen Psaki announced from the podium that the administration was “flagging problematic posts for Facebook” and in a separate briefing linked the administration’s antitrust agenda to platforms’ handling of misinformation. The FBI ran regular meetings with platform trust-and-safety teams and sent encrypted lists of accounts and posts for removal one to five times a month. That was the record Doughty found persuasive enough for a preliminary injunction, and that the Supreme Court ultimately sidestepped. Rosado’s record is narrower in scope but tighter on the specific causal chain. Bondi and Noem publicly demanded removals and took credit in real time. Apple and Facebook reversed previous approvals within hours. The timing and the public statements make the inference of coercion harder to escape for two specific plaintiffs and two specific pieces of content. Whether that tightness is enough to clear Murthy’s standing bar at the Supreme Court level, or whether a higher court will find the same counterfactual problem that disposed of the Biden-era challenge, is the question that will actually determine what this case produces as precedent. Both cases involve government pressure on platforms to delete disfavored speech. Both produced preliminary injunctions at the district court level. One has already gone through the full appellate process and ended with the Supreme Court ducking the merits. The other is at the beginning of that journey. Treating the Rosado injunction as a vindication of First Amendment doctrine, or as a sign that the system is now working correctly against jawboning, gets ahead of what the procedural posture actually supports. It’s where Missouri v. Biden was three years ago. The Biden administration’s plaintiffs had their win taken away by the Supreme Court’s standing doctrine. The honest read of the two cases is that the First Amendment doctrine governing government coercion of intermediaries is unsettled. NRA v. Vullo established the substantive principle that jawboning violates the First Amendment. Murthy made the standing requirements to challenge it demanding enough that sustained institutional pressure campaigns through private channels may be effectively unreviewable. Rosado is testing whether unusually public coercion clears that bar. If it does, the doctrine will protect speakers against incautious officials. If it doesn’t, the doctrine will protect almost no one in practice, regardless of which party’s officials are doing the coercing. A free-speech position that takes itself seriously has to hold that both the Biden administration’s campaign and the Trump administration’s campaign are constitutional problems, and that the appropriate remedy in both cases is a merits ruling rather than a standing-based dismissal or a loud district court injunction that gets pared back on appeal. Whether Rosado produces that kind of ruling is still an open question. The answer will tell us more about the state of First Amendment doctrine than either administration’s initial conduct did. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Judge Blocks Government Pressure on Apple, Meta Over ICE Tracking appeared first on Reclaim The Net.