A federal judge in Chicago has made permanent an order that stops federal officials from pressuring Facebook and Apple to remove an ICE-watching Facebook group, and an app.
The government has agreed to it.
The case was brought by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) in February on behalf of Kassandra “Kae” Rosado and Mark Hodges, who created a Facebook group and an app, respectively, that the government wanted removed.
On November 12, the government asked the court to turn a preliminary injunction granted in April into a permanent one, and dismiss the case with prejudice. The filing was a joint motion by the plaintiffs and the government, and on November 13, US District Court for the Northern District of Illinois Judge Jorge L. Alonso granted it.
The case was originally filed as Rosado v. Bondi, but as defendants – Attorney General Pam Bondi and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem – left office, they were replaced by their successors, so that the case is now known as Rosado v. Blanche. The lawsuit said that the government violated the First Amendment by pressuring Facebook and Apple to delete the group and the app.
The November 13 order states that officials, and anyone acting for them, “shall take no actions, formal or informal, to demand or pressure” Facebook to suppress the group, nor “to coerce or threaten Facebook with sanctions for allowing or reinstating” it.
The same goes for Apple: the government is not to pressure the company “to coerce or threaten Apple with sanctions for allowing or reinstating the Eyes Up application.”
The order also spells out the steps the government must take within seven days to inform all relevant parties – including the social media giants – of the ruling, and to inform the plaintiffs’ lawyers about this.
However, as Reclaim The Net noted in April, “The order stops federal officials from leaning on the platforms but leaves Apple and Facebook free to keep the deletions in place.”
In October 2025, Rosado, who runs a jewelry business, and Hodges, whose company is the Kreisau Group, found themselves in the crosshairs of then-Attorney General Pam Bondi and then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.
That was after Rosado’s group, started in January of that year, grew to almost 100,000 members during Operation Midway Blitz in Chicago, while Hodges’ company developed Eyes Up, an app that archived videos of ICE operations.
Eyes Up was pulled by Apple around October 2, along with other ICE apps including ICEBlock – the same day Bondi told Fox News that her office “reached out to Apple today demanding they remove the ICEBlock app from their App Store – and Apple did so.”
Apple said the app violated its rule against “defamatory, discriminatory, or mean-spirited content” – even though it had reviewed and approved the app in August.
Bondi and Noem both publicly said that Facebook had acted on their request and took credit for it, with Noem adding, “We will prosecute those who dox our agents to the fullest extent of the law.” Bondi announced that they were “not going to stop at just arresting the violent criminals we can see in the streets.”
The court found that the officials overstepped when they “demanded, rather than requested, that Facebook and Apple censor Plaintiff’s speech.”
In the April ruling, US District Court for the Northern District of Illinois Judge Jorge L. Alonso said that Facebook and Apple “changed their positions and removed the content immediately after Defendants contacted them about it,” and that the officials “made public statements taking credit for the fact that Facebook and Apple had removed the content.”
Although the officials’ statements “may not be direct threats to prosecute Facebook and Apple, they are intimations of a threat,” the judge wrote.
FIRE said that the officials “bullied” the companies into removing the content, and that the lawsuit was filed to stop them from doing it again.
Rosado said she created the group “to inform and protect my community, not knowing that doing so would lead government officials to try to silence me.”
Hodges noted that it shouldn’t take a lawsuit to make the government respect constitutional rights, while FIRE attorney Colin McDonell stressed that the First Amendment protects sharing of truthful information about the government, and that this is not a partisan issue.
Reclaim The Net in February noted that the officials’ argument – that the safety of their officers is at risk – could be undermined by the fact that apps like Waze and Apple Maps allow drivers to report police locations, yet no attorney general demanded that these be removed from app stores.
In April, we observed that the Supreme Court’s Murthy v. Missouri ruling left government pressure campaigns run through private channels hard to challenge – but that “Rosado is testing whether unusually public coercion clears that bar.”
The JAWBONE Act, S. 4749, sponsored by Ted Cruz and Ron Wyden, is a bill that would bar federal officials from coercing platforms into removing speech.
FIRE declared it a victory, saying that the government agreed to stop censoring the two individuals. But the win came only because the officials involved were so open about their actions. The government settled rather than defend the case, so there is no appeals ruling.
The Facebook group and the app do not have to be brought back by the social media giants, and any future pressure that is not made public remains hard to prove. The problem of government overreach in this manner remains, and what is needed is not case-by-case lawsuits but a clear legal bar that would stop officials of any party from attempting to remove speech in this way.
