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BOSTON — A senior Department of Homeland Security official testified in court Wednesday that the federal government created reports on potential criminal conduct by more than 100 student protesters across the country, drawing their names from a 5,000-person list compiled by the doxxing website Canary Mission.

Peter J. Hatch, the official charged with overseeing the DHS’s Office of Intelligence, was the first federal official to testify in the trial for a Harvard faculty group’s lawsuit against the Trump administration. The group, Harvard’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors, joined a lawsuit by the national organization in March against the administration for allegedly violating the First Amendment by attempting to deport noncitizen students and faculty involved in pro-Palestine advocacy.

The case — a key test of the Trump administration’s ability to use immigration law to deport student protesters — went to trial on Monday, when lawyers for both parties presented opening arguments and began calling witnesses. The plaintiffs argued that the Trump administration’s “ideological deportation policy” of deporting noncitizen student protesters meaningfully infringed on their freedom of speech. But the government said such a policy doesn’t exist at all.

On Wednesday, lawyers for the AAUP questioned Hatch about an effort his team undertook beginning in March to compile informational reports about student protesters who might have violated U.S. criminal law or immigration and customs law. The reports included five noncitizen students — including Mahmhoud Khalil, the Columbia University student who was arrested and threatened with deportation — whom the AAUP claimed in court were targeted by immigration officials for their pro-Palestine speech.

During his testimony, Hatch said he met with senior officials at Homeland Security Investigations, the investigative branch of the DHS under which the Office of Intelligence is housed, in March to discuss the effort to research student protesters and subsequently assembled a “tiger team” of analysts to comb through Canary Mission’s thousands of profiles.

Canary Mission has published the names of students at North American universities that “promote hatred of the USA, Israel, and Jews,” building profile pages for individuals that detail allegedly antisemitic actions, including links to social media accounts and public statements. Though founded in 2015, the site’s popularity skyrocketed after Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attacks.

Hatch did not say whether Harvard students or faculty were among those discussed in the more than 100 reports his office ultimately produced, though more than 80 University affiliates have been doxxed on Canary Mission’s website.

Though the Canary Mission list was the “most conclusive” list reviewed by the HSI, analysts pulled data from other sources to compile the final report, Hatch said. He added that only an individual’s direct actions or statements are included in the report, which excludes third-party allegations.

Hatch said the reports detail their subjects’ history of employment, travel, criminal activity, and support for terrorist groups — including public statements backing terrorist leaders and donations to terrorist groups or affiliated organizations. When asked by the judge overseeing the case and a lawyer for the plaintiffs, Hatch said phrases such as “Hamas is right,” “Free Palestine,” or criticism of the Israeli state could be included depending on the “circumstances of the individual.”

Hatch stressed during his testimony that his office produces strictly factual reports and is not responsible for determining subjects’ guilt or innocence. The reports were sent from Hatch’s office to the HSI’s national security division, which provided an initial recommendation to the State Department. The State Department ultimately decided how to act based on the reports.

Hatch testified that in his more than five years working at HSI, he had never been tasked with producing reports on foreign students.

Lawyers and the federal judge overseeing the case, William G. Young ’62, debated in filings and in court Wednesday the degree to which the reports on students could be entered into evidence for the case. Government lawyers claimed law enforcement privilege, arguing that revealing the reports would expose HSI’s practices to potential criminals.

The reports — a subset of the more than 100 that the agency compiled — detail the five noncitizen students who were arrested by federal immigration enforcement and threatened with deportation. The AAUP alleges that the five students were targeted for their pro-Palestinian speech as a part of the Trump administration’s ideological deportation policy.

Young ultimately ruled on Wednesday that the government must provide partially redacted reports by 5 p.m. to the plaintiffs’ attorneys only, but could later withdraw them if the represented federal agencies determine that unredacted access would compromise future investigations. A government lawyer said he would discuss unredacting the documents with federal agency officials.

Hatch’s testimony came on the third day of the trial for the AAUP’s lawsuit, which was filed jointly by the organization’s national office, its chapters at Harvard, New York University, and Rutgers University, and the Middle East Studies Association in late March.

Five faculty members, including Harvard Philosophy professor Bernhard Nickel, have testified in the case so far, saying that noncitizens on their campuses have withheld their speech out of concern that they could be arrested and threatened with deportation, like Khalil and other pro-Palestine student activists.

Nickel, the former Philosophy Department chair and a green card holder from Germany, said Tuesday that he has canceled all international travel and withdrawn from any political speech after seeing the arrest of Tufts University student Rumeysa Ozturk. In March, masked plainsclothes immigration officers arrested Ozturk, who wrote a pro-Palestine op-ed in her campus paper, which many have argued was the basis for her detention.

Nickel said during the trial on Tuesday that he had attended protests and signed open letters before Ozturk’s arrest, including one supporting “Palestinian liberation” in 2021, and that he was “scared” that the government would target him for deportation after seeing the arrests of Ozturk and Khalil.

“I actually love this country,” Nickel said. “That love never changed, and as my fear of political reprisal grew, I just don’t feel that way about the country in quite the same way. It’s depressing and it’s destabilizing.”

—Staff writer William C. Mao can be reached at william.mao@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @williamcmao.

—Staff writer Laurel M. Shugart can be reached at laurel.shugart@thecrimson.com. Follow them on X @laurelmshugart.