Was it really worth spending nearly a million dollars to spy on university students?

Amid everything going on these days in the United States, this story has flown a bit under the radar. Yet for those who follow undercover investigations, it’s a textbook case of what happens when a tool designed to expose power is instead used by power to suppress dissent.

Undercover reporting is a powerful tool. In the hands of journalists or activists, it can help uncover abuse and structural inequality — a bottom-up method to reveal what power prefers to keep hidden. But when institutions deploy it to monitor citizens — especially younger, politically active ones — it becomes something else entirely: a top-down weapon used to intimidate, normalize surveillance, and shut down social conflict.

That’s the core of the scandal that recently rocked the University of Michigan, where The Guardian revealed that the university had spent nearly $900,000 hiring private investigators to infiltrate and surveil pro-Palestinian students and activists. For over a year, undercover agents followed these students on and off campus, secretly recording video and listening in on conversations in libraries, bars, and cafés.

They didn’t uncover anything, other than the daily routines of a group of students committed to Palestinian solidarity. The surveillance — or rather, the revelation that it existed — sparked an uproar and was widely criticized as an attempt to undermine free expression. Many activists reported feeling watched, intimidated, and discouraged from attending meetings or joining protests.

After the story broke, the university’s interim president announced the termination of the contract with City Shield, the security firm behind the operation, and promised to end all use of plainclothes security on campus. But for many in the university community, that move raised more questions than it answered.

How did a program like this come to exist in the first place? Who approved such a large expense — and to what end? In this issue, we try to piece together what happened. We explore what those agents actually did, what legal and constitutional questions their actions raise, and what toll this has already taken on the students who were targeted.

This issue of Debrief is written by Sacha, and edited by Luigi.

The Michigan Misfits

The agents, employees of a Detroit-based private security company called City Shield, were hired by the University of Michigan in 2023 to blend into campus life and keep close watch on student groups supporting Palestinian rights. But from the very start, the undercover operation felt surreal.

In Ann Arbor — the Midwestern college town that’s home to the University of Michigan and has long been associated with progressive activism and student movements — teams of agents followed students through the streets, often working in pairs or small groups.

“They were monitoring students to see where they were going, who they were meeting with. They were observing some of the protest activity, trying to identify who was involved and creating lists of individuals they could track — whether for administrative hearings within the university or to be shared with law enforcement. It was just information gathering. That’s what they were doing,” said Amir Makled, the defense attorney representing several of the students and activists targeted by the operation.

As the months went by, students began to notice the surveillance. Strangers would sit at tables next to them and listen in on private conversations, or loiter outside meetings and campus events. Some agents followed students home or monitored the places they frequented.

“The private investigation firms that the University of Michigan hired weren’t very professional. It was clear these guys were amateurs in how they conducted their surveillance. Students started noticing them, questioning why they were around — and some even confronted the agents directly,” Makled added.

One particularly striking case is that of Josiah Walker, a senior who, suspecting he was being followed by the same individuals, pulled out his phone to record one of them. The agent, caught off guard, first pretended to limp and act “mentally disturbed,” then abruptly changed tactics. In the video, he’s seen accusing the student of stealing his wallet and threatening him.

Two weeks later, Walker encountered the same man again. This time, incredibly, the agent pretended to be deaf and mute when approached, only to start yelling moments later. “It was extraordinarily racist… and extremely ableist,” Walker told CBS News, referring to the agent’s use of a fake disability as a form of provocation.

Another student reported that a plainclothes car sped toward him in a campus parking lot, forcing him to jump out of the way. He later learned that the driver was most likely one of the undercover agents.

Put up a flyer, end up in jail

"On another level it sometimes feels comedic because it’s so insane," said Katarina Keating, a graduate student who was regularly followed. "The university spent millions of dollars to hire some goons to follow campus activists around. It’s just such a waste of money and time," she told The Guardian. But she was quick to add that in reality, the experience left her constantly looking over her shoulder, making it hard to find anything funny about a situation where her life was under scrutiny.

In fact, intimidation seems to have been a central feature of the operation. Undercover agents did not interact naturally with students, nor did they simply observe in silence. Instead, they often harassed the individuals they were following—hurling insults, trying to provoke arguments, and creating pretexts to accuse them of misconduct.

Video footage and reports compiled by City Shield were shared with campus police and local prosecutors, who used them in disciplinary proceedings and even in criminal cases. During a protest in late 2024, a student activist — Henry MacKeen-Shapiro — was arrested and briefly jailed after an agent claimed he had violated a university ban by posting flyers on campus. (The student denied any wrongdoing, but still spent four days in jail before the alleged violation was dismissed.)

The student’s attorney confirmed that evidence collected by the private investigators was indeed used to target some of his clients. The charge against MacKeen-Shapiro centered on the fact that he had remained on campus between classes to hang flyers supporting the Palestinian cause. “One of the students we were representing had been on campus putting up flyers in between his class times… and that was found to be a violation,” explained Makled, emphasizing that the report came directly from the undercover agents hired by the university.

These were the kinds of “violations” at the heart of a surveillance operation that cost nearly a million dollars.

A Playbook for Rights Violations

“My university has no business doing this… this is not how we should operate,” wrote Sam Bagenstos, a law professor at the University of Michigan and former official at the U.S. Department of Justice, commenting on the scandal.

“They’re an institution that says they’re about free speech, academic freedom… and yet they’re using tools to try to chill the speech of their own students, and it’s extremely inappropriate,” said Amir Makled, calling the covert surveillance of pro-Palestinian activists a fundamental breach of the values the University of Michigan claims to uphold.

Lindsie Rank, Director of Student Rights at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), noted that using private investigators in this way is almost unheard of in a university setting. “This certainly is not the best thing for a culture of free speech on campus… It does cause a chilling effect,” she said, highlighting how such operations can intimidate even students not directly targeted.

According to numerous legal experts, the university’s actions may have crossed constitutional boundaries, raising serious concerns related to the First Amendment (freedom of speech and expression) and the Fourth Amendment (protection against unreasonable searches and seizures).

Normally, law enforcement needs a warrant to conduct prolonged surveillance or gather certain types of evidence. But the University of Michigan — not a law enforcement agency — outsourced the task to a private security firm. According to Makled, the university may have tried to circumvent constitutional protections by using contractors as proxies for police.

Makled was clear: “These are inappropriate tactics… If the surveillance was done in coordination with law enforcement, then they could be violating the Fourth Amendment.”

In at least one documented case, a campus police officer’s bodycam captured a group chat on his phone labeled “U-M intel,” used by the undercover agents to share videos and information about students — suggesting real-time coordination between private investigators and law enforcement.

But the most controversial development came in April 2025, with a series of early-morning raids. On April 23, agents from the FBI, Michigan State Police, and the office of Attorney General Dana Nessel raided at least five homes of student activists. Arriving in unmarked vehicles, the agents confiscated laptops and phones, and detained six students for questioning. Witnesses say the warrants — issued by Nessel’s office — were extremely vague and didn’t clearly specify any crimes. Authorities later justified the raids as part of an investigation into “multi-jurisdictional vandalism,” though no formal charges were ever filed.

Several organizations, including MPAC and CAIR Michigan, condemned the raids as a serious violation of privacy and free expression, accusing the state of attempting to intimidate pro-Palestinian student activists. Even the New York Times, in an editorial, called the operation “a disproportionate security response to students exercising a constitutional right.”

The human cost for the students.

For the students involved, being followed by strangers, photographed, and even provoked in public took a serious psychological toll. “My junior year was marked by fear and paranoia,” Josiah Walker told CBS. He described scanning every crowd, every room, searching for familiar faces to see if he was being followed again.

Some students adopted “counter-surveillance” techniques: they took photos of the strangers tailing them, filmed them, and tried to identify them on social media. All of this was an attempt to regain control over their daily lives. “They didn’t expect to be spied on by their own university,” said Makled. “And it feels like a deep betrayal of trust. They feel watched… and that’s not right.”

Many students reported still feeling unsafe on campus, changing their daily routes or avoiding public events. The Diag — the historic central plaza of the university, a symbol of student protest since the Vietnam era — has become, for some, a place of anxiety rather than dialogue.

Even students not directly involved in the protests expressed concern: if the university surveilled one group for its political views, what’s to stop it from doing it again — to others?

Michigan, always full of surprises

Several years before the University of Michigan surveillance scandal, the state was already at the center of another undercover controversy: the case of the University of Farmington. Between 2016 and 2019, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) created a completely fake university — complete with a website, a Detroit mailing address, and an administrative facade — with the goal of luring international students suspected of violating the terms of their visas.

The project was framed as a strategy to combat so-called “pay-to-stay” fraud — a practice where foreign students enroll in non-existent or inactive schools in order to legally maintain their visa status without attending real classes. In reality, it turned into a government-run trap.

Roughly 600 foreign students enrolled in Farmington believing it was a legitimate, accredited institution. Many of them — especially from India — paid thousands of dollars in tuition, amounting to over $6 million, unaware that the entire setup was a federal sting operation.

When the scheme was exposed in 2019, 161 students were arrested for immigration-related violations. Some had even visited the supposed campus in person, asking when classes would begin. In response, the Indian government lodged formal diplomatic protests, and numerous U.S. civil rights organizations accused DHS of entrapment — luring individuals acting in good faith only to criminalize them.

The parallels with the Ann Arbor scandal are striking. In both cases, state or federal authorities posed as legitimate educational institutions or security actors — not to protect students, but to monitor, control, and punish them. And in both cases, what was ultimately betrayed was trust: the trust students place in the institutions that are supposed to support them — not deceive them.

What if it’s happening in your city too?

The Michigan case, while striking, is far from isolated. “I think there’s been similar tactics used at Columbia and NYU and UCLA,” Amir Makled told us. And indeed, across campuses from New York to Los Angeles, there have been reports of surveillance, file-building, infiltration, and targeted repression against politically active students — especially those supporting Palestinian causes. In an era of rising geopolitical tension and internal polarization, the space for dissent on American campuses seems to be shrinking by the day.

Whether it’s police embedded in protests, software monitoring students’ social media, or private contractors with hidden cameras tucked inside backpacks, the pattern is clear: more surveillance, less freedom. And if academic freedom isn’t protected inside universities, where can it be protected at all?

See you in the next Debrief,
Luigi & Sacha