US law enforcement agents obtained authorization to use a controversial surveillance device capable of intercepting cell phone signals to find and arrest a 21-year-old college student who helped produce journalist Don Lemon’s coverage of an anti-ICE protest, court filings show.

The former student, Jerome Richardson, who has since graduated from Temple University, is among 39 people charged with conspiring to violate worshippers’ civil rights and interfering with religious worship at Cities Church in St. Paul, Minnesota, in January. Protesters said they targeted the church’s January 18 service because one of its pastors, David Easterwood, also led ICE’s St. Paul field office. Those charged include journalists Georgia Fort and Lemon, a former CNN host, who say they were there to cover the demonstration.

Twelve days after the protest, judges in two states began signing warrants authorizing agents to use so-called cell-site simulators, commonly known as Stingrays or IMSI catchers, to target Richardson’s phone: one in Minnesota on January 30 and another in Pennsylvania the next day. The purpose, his lawyers wrote in a motion seeking to exclude the tracking evidence, was “locating and arresting him.”

Agents also applied for cell-site simulator warrants targeting the phones of Fort and Jamael Lundy, then a Minnesota State Senate candidate. They separately sought pen register orders, which can log the numbers a phone contacts, for Fort and a number WIRED traced to Lemon. It’s unclear whether a judge approved any of those applications.

The records reviewed by WIRED do not establish whether investigators actually deployed a cell-site simulator to locate Richardson or whether judges approved the applications targeting Fort and Lundy. In a July letter filed in court, Fort’s lawyers said prosecutors “did not know” whether the surveillance applications had been authorized or had yielded evidence.

Cell-site simulators impersonate cell phone towers to locate a target’s phone. In doing so, they can also collect identifying information from any nearby cellular device, including those belonging to people who aren’t suspected of a crime. That indiscriminate collection has made the devices controversial among privacy advocates, who describe them as dragnet surveillance tools.

The use of cell-site simulators has long been shrouded in secrecy. FBI records released in 2023 showed that police borrowing its simulators had to agree to keep details of their use secret, even in court. Privacy advocates have long warned that the devices could be turned against protesters and journalists.

“Using an advanced surveillance capability such as a cell-site simulator against members of the free press for reporting stories that are unfavorable to the president is an appalling attack on the First Amendment,” says Cooper Quintin, senior staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a tech-focused civil liberties nonprofit. Quintin has spent years researching the devices and developing tools to help people detect them. Using EFF’s detection software, WIRED found evidence suggesting a cell-site simulator was deployed near the 2024 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, though who operated it and for what purpose remain unknown.