The Electronic Frontier Foundation says Google handed over the account data of Amandla Thomas-Johnson to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement without giving him the chance to challenge the request. In the account laid out by the EFF, that meant Google broke a nearly decade-long promise to notify users before turning their data over to law enforcement in cases where no court order or gag provision applied.
Thomas-Johnson says the episode began after a brief appearance at a pro-Palestinian protest in September 2024, while he was studying in the United States on a student visa. He says ICE sent Google an administrative subpoena in April 2025, and that Google later gave the information to the agency without advance notice. The EFF says the company then failed to follow its usual notification practice, which it says exists so users can contest demands before their data is disclosed.
The stakes are not only personal. According to the EFF, the subpoena sought subscriber information, IP addresses, physical address details, session times and other identifiers. The organization says those fragments can be combined into a detailed surveillance profile even if message content is not included. That makes the case about more than one student: it is about how much information can be assembled from routine account records.
The EFF also says Google's exceptions to its notification promise do not fit this case. The group says ICE requested that Google not tell Thomas-Johnson, but that the request was not enforceable or required by a court. That distinction matters because the dispute is not over whether law enforcement can ask for data. It is over whether Google had a duty to warn the user first.
Thomas-Johnson says he only learned of the handover after he was in Geneva, when a Google email told him the company had already responded to legal process compelling the release of information related to his account. In his account, the notice came too late to challenge anything. The EFF frames that sequence as the central failure.
The organization says it has now sent complaints to the California and New York attorneys general asking them to investigate Google for deceptive trade practices. That step turns a privacy dispute into a regulatory one. If attorneys general take up the case, the question will be whether the company's public promise of notice has legal force and whether users can rely on it when government subpoenas arrive.
The evidence supplied with this item is one-sided, and it is clear about being one-sided: it is the EFF's complaint and Thomas-Johnson's account. Even so, the material is concrete. It describes a person, a subpoena, a disclosure, a failed notice and a formal complaint. That is enough to report the allegation and the regulatory response without overstating what has been independently established.
