This story was originally published at Prism.
Go down the rabbit hole that is Reddit, and you’ll find everything from obsessive true crime and royal fandoms to videos of strangers having public breakdowns on the subway or on the street, or both. There’s even an entire forum devoted to discussions around the best hot sauce on the market.
But Reddit, the social media platform built around nearly 140,000 communities, isn’t just a chaotic curiosity shop. It also hosts groups and forums grappling with high-stakes, real-world issues.
Since the start of President Donald Trump’s second term on Jan. 20, at least seven popular immigration-focused subreddits have emerged, including r/EyesOnICE, r/ICE_Raids, and r/LaMigra, according to an analysis by Prism. Together, these communities have amassed nearly 500,000 members. While many started as spaces to track the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids and share real-time alerts, they’ve evolved into hubs for policy updates and collective support.
“Immigration lawyers are very expensive, so my first stop is always Reddit,” one user, who did not share their identity to avoid endangering themselves, told Prism in an email. They described being afraid that ICE agents might detain them during a marriage appointment at a courthouse in the Midwest—a fear sparked by reports of similar incidents happening at courts across the country.
“My fiancée and I have been dating since the end of 2022. We met while I was working without papers at a hotel. … I arrived in the U.S. in October 2020 but overstayed my visa in search of a better life,” said the user, who is 25 years old and originally from Jamaica. “I’m very grateful for the support of the immigrant community, especially in subreddits like r/immigration and r/USCIS. The redditors are always supportive and helpful.”
While some immigration-related subreddits have existed for years, several new ones have cropped up to meet the moment. For example, r/ICE_Raids was created on Jan. 24 to document ICE-related incidents across the country. It drew 349,000 visitors since its creation, according to one of the subreddit’s moderators. According to internal statistics shared with Prism, the most significant growth curve occurred in June, amassing 10 million visits that month; that was when ICE conducted mass raids in Pennsylvania, Chicago, and California, among other locations. These operations were met with strong public responses, including the Los Angeles protests, which began on June 6.
“A lot of content that’s being shared by mainstream media [is] first posted and discussed in these subreddits,” the moderator, who requested anonymity due to their occupation in news media and to avoid speaking for other moderators, told Prism.
At their core, immigration-related subreddits serve as anonymous spaces where users can share, search, and document everything from firsthand accounts of enforcement actions and “AMAs,” or “Ask Me Anything” sessions, with immigrants who were deported during Trump’s first term to broader discussions on migrant rights and immigration reform. And while many posts reside within ICE-focused threads and immigration-specific subreddits, mentions of immigration enforcement extend beyond these areas.
Local subreddits such as r/harlem and r/sacramento frequently feature discussions about ICE (known as la migra in Spanish), with users posting real-time warnings when immigration agents are spotted near homes and workplaces.
These subreddits also often serve as gateways, guiding users toward more private and encrypted platforms, such as Signal and Discord, or tools like People Over Papers, a crowdsourcing map for reporting ICE activity nationwide.
While ICE-specific subreddits tend to operate as alert systems, others, such as r/immigration, serve a broader purpose. Users flock there not only to share news and experiences, but also to seek advice on legal processes, documentation, and navigating the U.S. immigration system.
READ: Bucks County Commissioners Meeting Packed with Residents Fired Up Over Sheriff’s ICE Agreement
For long-established communities like r/immigration, founded in 2009 and now home to over 220,000 members, this kind of peer-to-peer support has become an integral part of its work. However, according to the subreddit’s description, r/immigration was born as a place to “discuss U.S. and worldwide immigration news, politics, visas, green cards, raids, deportations, etc.”
Apart from introducing a new dimension to its mission, the subreddit’s growing visibility also brought challenges. As immigration becomes a more polarizing and high-profile issue, moderators—volunteers in charge of the platform’s content moderation—face an influx of new users and posts, many of which come from individuals unfamiliar with the rules or the intended purpose of the space.
R/immigration is a prime example of what happens when a community’s visibility suddenly surges due to political events, explained Galen Weld, a Reddit researcher at the University of Washington’s Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering and a longtime moderator, one of the nearly 60,000 volunteers who do unpaid labor for Reddit.
“There can be some current event, a new announcement from the Trump administration, or an executive order, and you get this spike in community growth, which is very difficult to manage,” Weld said. “That creates a ton more work for the moderators who suddenly feel they need to monitor the subreddit 24/7. They care about the topic and want to help people … but you can’t pay attention to your community 24 hours a day and not burn out.”
It’s no surprise that more people are turning to social media for news, including immigrants. Just on Reddit, conversations around immigration and ICE raids in the U.S. generated roughly 1.2 million mentions by mid-July—a more than 500% increase compared with the same period in February, according to data from Rolli, an AI-powered platform for journalists.
But this growth also comes with risks. Although many moderators use pseudonyms on Reddit, a particularly alarming incident occurred in January when the group r/LaMigra was forced to shut down temporarily after the Instagram account Libs of Reddit doxxed one of its moderators, publishing their name, face, and home address. According to The Washington Post, the moderator was inundated with death threats, anti-immigrant slurs, and antisemitic attacks.
Still, Reddit’s structure offers distinct advantages over other platforms. Unlike Facebook Groups, which often require private membership and approval, most Reddit communities are publicly accessible.
READ: What It Feels Like to Be an Immigrant Living in Trump’s America
“I believe Reddit has a stronger culture of trust and authenticity, something that’s very important when you’re talking about topics like immigration,” Weld said. “Having these specific communities provides people with a sense of shared identity and solidarity, regardless of how practically helpful it is in terms of specific legal advice.”
One of the Reddit moderators Prism spoke with agreed. “My guess is that the main motivation for people posting on these forums is to make their communities aware,” they said.
Prism is an independent and nonprofit newsroom led by journalists of color. We report from the ground up and at the intersections of injustice.
Editorial Team:
Sahar Fatima, Lead Editor
Lara Witt, Top Editor
Rashmee Kumar, Copy Editor
