Rare sworn testimony from federal agents revealed that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers in Oregon were instructed to meet daily arrest quotas and use technological tools to identify potential “targets” during immigration raids, according to The Guardian.

The information emerged during hearings for a class-action lawsuit filed by the immigrant rights organization Innovation Law Lab, which challenges the practice of detaining people without a warrant or probable cause. The case compelled agents to testify in court, offering a rare glimpse into internal tactics that are not typically made public.

During a hearing held in December, an agent identified as “JB” testified that his team received a verbal order to make eight arrests per day during operations in the state. The group consisted of between nine and 12 officers. When the plaintiffs’ attorney asked him if he had met the quota, the agent replied, ““I made as many arrests as I could, as long as it was lawful.”

The operations were linked to a federal campaign known internally as Operation Black Rose, which took place in the Portland area last year and, according to data from the Department of Homeland Security, resulted in more than 1,200 arrests as of mid-December.

The testimony also revealed for the first time in court the use of an app called Elite, described by the agent as a tool similar to Google Maps, which shows the estimated concentration of people with an “immigration nexus” in certain areas. As he explained, the app helps locate areas where there is a higher probability of finding people subject to detention. However, he acknowledged that the data is not always accurate. “The app could say 100%, and it’s wrong. The person doesn’t live there. And so it’s not accurate. It’s a tool that we use that gives you probability, but there’s … no such thing as 100%,” he stated during the hearing.

The use of this tool was evident during an operation conducted on October 30 in Woodburn, south of Portland, where officers followed a van transporting farmworkers to their workplace. The officers smashed the vehicle’s windows and detained its seven occupants. During that same operation, another officer used a facial recognition app called Mobile Fortify to identify a worker who was detained and transferred to a detention center in Washington State. She was later released.

Federal Judge Mustafa Kasubhai, who reviewed the case, harshly criticized the tactics used, noting that tools like Elite could create inaccurate information and lead to the detention of people who are in the country legally.

As the case proceeds through the courts, federal data released this week shows the scale of the increase in immigration detentions in the U.S. Northwest during 2025. An analysis by the University of Washington’s Center for Human Rights found that Oregon recorded 1,655 immigration arrests last year, more than in the previous three years combined. The increase was particularly notable in the final months of the year.

Between January and September 2025, monthly detentions in the state remained below 100, but in October and November they exceeded 400 per month, according to an analysis based on official ICE forms used to initiate deportation proceedings. The researchers noted that the Portland metropolitan area was one of the main hubs of that activity. “We were frankly blown away by the scale of the arrests in the Portland area from October to December of last year,” Phil Neff, the university center’s research coordinator, told reporters.

Other reports have also documented a sharp increase in arrests during that period. Data collected by researchers and analyzed by Oregon Public Broadcasting indicates that in some counties in the Portland area, arrests skyrocketed by more than 600% after President Donald Trump described the city as “war-torn.” The figures show that Multnomah, Washington, and Marion counties recorded the largest increases during the fall of 2025.

Attorneys and civil rights organizations argue that the pressure to increase arrests may have contributed to questionable practices during operations. Stephen Manning, executive director of the Innovation Law Lab and one of the lawyers behind the lawsuit, stated that court testimony shows how arrest quotas can influence the way officers conduct their operations. “The law is an impediment to the quotas,” he told The Guardian.

The lawsuit seeks to put a stop to arrests without a warrant and to determine whether the tactics used by agents violated constitutional protections against unreasonable searches and seizures. Meanwhile, investigators warn that the available data may even underestimate the actual number of arrests, since the records analyzed reflect only a fraction of all ICE detentions.

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Morocco and Algeria are observing the U.S. and Israeli attacks against Iran through the lens of the Western Sahara conflict. Washington’s latest attempt to resolve the long-running dispute over the former Spanish colony, through a round of direct dialogue launched last month in Madrid, is conditioning Rabat and Algiers’ response to the escalating conflict engulfing the Middle East.

Both North African countries have avoided condemning the bombings on Iranian soil amid ongoing diplomatic talks, which are scheduled to resume in Washington in May in a regional dispute that is about to turn 50 years old. Last year, the U.S. announced major investments by its companies in the Morocco-controlled Western Sahara, considered by the United Nations a non-self-governing territory.

Morocco—which severed relations with Iran in 2018 after accusing it of rearming the Polisario Front national liberation movement in Western Sahara—has once again ignored the attacks on a fellow Muslim state. Meanwhile, Algeria has reversed course on its earlier rejection of the U.S.-Israeli offensive against the Islamic Republic conducted in June.

Instead Morocco, through its Foreign Minister Nasser Bourita, has condemned Iran’s “atrocious” attacks against its Arab neighbors at the Arab League. However, this expression of solidarity with “brotherly Arab countries” failed to mention Lebanon, which is suffering a large-scale Israeli offensive, and also made no reference to the attacks against Iran, a Shia Muslim state. Rabat also holds Tehran responsible for “creating terrorist entities and groups.” The severing of diplomatic relations occurred eight years ago after the same minister accused the Ayatollah regime of sending anti-aircraft missiles to the Polisario Front, a group with which Morocco is waging a low-intensity war in the Sahara after the ceasefire between the two sides collapsed in 2020. Bourita also denounced the presence of military experts from Hezbollah, a pro-Iranian Lebanese Shia militia, in the camps of Tindouf, in southwest Algeria, which are home to Sahrawi refugees.

This “selective silence” about the attacks on Iran, as dubbed by the media, is viewed from different perspectives in the Arab countries of Northwest Africa. Besides fearing that the conflict in the Middle East will overshadow the search for a political solution for Western Sahara, the government in Rabat is examining the potential economic consequences for its own economic growth.

Morocco may be particularly affected by rising energy costs and spiraling inflation. Algeria, as a hydrocarbon-producing country, views the rising oil and gas prices as a blessing. With a projected 22 million visitors in 2026, Moroccan tour operators also fear a potential exodus of Western tourists, as holiday bookings are lagging due to ongoing conflict in the Middle East, where cancellations are already cascading.

Convened by the United States in Madrid and Washington following UN Security Council Resolution 2797, adopted on October 31, the Algerian government has agreed to dialogue—along with Morocco, the Polisario Front, and Mauritania—on the basis of “genuine autonomy” as the “most feasible” objective for a political solution to the Western Sahara conflict. While favoring Sahrawi independence through self-determination, Algiers now seeks to maintain its relationship with Washington to counterbalance the close alliance the U.S. and Morocco have established in the Maghreb region.

Escalation of rearmament

Over the past five years, Morocco has become the leading arms importer on the African continent, surpassing Algeria. The 2025 Global Arms Transfer Trends Report published by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) shows a 12% increase in arms imports by Morocco between 2021 and 2025, compared to the previous five-year period. Algeria experienced a 78% decrease during the same period, although SIPRI cautions that the secrecy surrounding its arms procurement operations may skew the figures. Its main suppliers are Russia (39%) and China (27%).

The United States is Morocco’s largest military supplier, accounting for 60% of imports, followed by Israel at 24%. U.S. defense authorization legislation explicitly conditions arms sales to Morocco on the maintenance of normalized relations with Israel. Rabat agreed to reopen its diplomatic mission in Tel Aviv in 2020, as part of the Abraham Accords signed during Donald Trump’s first term. In return, the Republican president recognized Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara.

A widening chasm has opened between the Moroccan state apparatus—which seeks to preserve the assets of its relationship with Israel—and civil society, which has overwhelmingly expressed outrage at the images of Palestinian suffering in Gaza, revealing a latent crisis in the North African country. Following the Israeli and U.S. attacks on Iran, groups of demonstrators have attempted to protest in the streets of Moroccan cities against the aggression on an Islamic country with which they feel connected through the umma, the community of Muslim believers cited in the Quran as an identity that transcends borders.

The protest marches were contained by a large deployment of security forces outside the parliament building in Rabat and in Tangier’s Iberia Square. The Justice and Development Party, an Islamist movement that led the government from 2011 to 2021, and the far left Federation of the Democratic Left have openly condemned the attacks, which they say violate international law.

A statement signed by several Moroccan ulama (Muslim legal scholars) along with other Islamic clerics from the region, cited by the online site Yabiladi, maintains that, despite the ideological clash between the Shiite Iranian regime and Sunni Muslim countries such as Morocco, “attacking Iran in an alliance of crusaders and Zionists constitutes an external aggression against a Muslim country, regardless of the regime that governs it.”

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When Iran began launching drones and missiles against Arab Gulf states in response to the US-Israeli offensive against Iran on February 28, much of the attention turned to the attacks on energy infrastructure. Saudi Arabia’s main refinery, Qatar’s largest liquefied natural gas export complex, an oil terminal in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and Bahrain’s largest refinery were all targeted.

In the early hours of this escalation, however, other strategic facilities were also targeted in attacks that went largely unnoticed. In the early hours of March 1, an Amazon data center in the UAE was struck by a drone, the company reported. Shortly afterward, another center belonging to the American tech giant suffered a direct hit. And a short time later, a third, this time in Bahrain, was damaged by another drone strike.

Since Amazon is the preferred partner of many companies and governments in the region, the attacks caused immediate disruptions: customers of Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank, one of the largest banks in the Emirates, had trouble accessing their online banking services; readers of the business news outlet Enterprise were unable to access its website; and users of the Careem app were unable to order a taxi or food delivery.

Iranian attacks against the digital ecosystems of its Arab neighbors in the Persian Gulf are considered among the first military actions of their kind in the world, and have exposed new vulnerabilities in these countries, including their multi-billion-dollar investment to become a hub for the development of artificial intelligence (AI). For Iran, it has been a cheap and effective way to disrupt public and private services, while for its neighbors in the region, it has served as a warning about their economic diversification strategies.

“Tehran didn’t choose these targets at random,” says Mohammed Soliman, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute (MEI) and author of the book West Asia: A New Grand Strategy for the Middle East. “Data centers are the backbone of the Gulf’s post-oil economic strategy, and Iran knows it,” he adds, so “attacking them was an attempt to sow doubt about whether the Gulf is a safe bet.”

Data centers are large physical facilities designed to store, process, and distribute massive amounts of digital data, and they are a key component of AI infrastructure. All the Gulf States have invested to varying degrees in the development of this technology and in transforming the region into a key hub for its global advancement, leveraging their geographic location between continents and access to both abundant and inexpensive energy, as well as the vast capital of their sovereign wealth funds. “This combination of location, energy and capital becomes a competitive advantage that is hard to match,” Soliman points out.

Leading this race are the UAE and Saudi Arabia, the two major Gulf powers. The Emirati initiative is spearheaded by G42, its main conglomerate specializing in AI development, chaired by the influential Tahnoon bin Zayed, a member of the royal family and the country’s national security advisor. The Saudi project is headed by Humain, backed by the Public Investment Fund (PIF) and directed by Tareq Amin, the former head of technology at the state-owned oil company Aramco.

While oil and gas from the Gulf countries have historically been central to U.S. foreign policy in the region, in recent years its strong commitment to developing artificial intelligence has become increasingly important in its diplomatic ties. U.S. technology companies need the Gulf’s energy and capital, and the Gulf depends on access to America’s cutting-edge technology and talent to drive its plans.

In December 2025, the United States spearheaded an international agreement, Pax Silica, to promote a consensus on the economic security that must guarantee the artificial intelligence ecosystem of the future. Among the 10 signatory countries were the United Arab Emirates and Qatar. The Under Secretary of State for Economic Affairs Jacob Helberg stated that “if the 20th century was based on oil and steel, the 21st century is based on computing and the minerals that power it.”

In May 2025, U.S. President Donald Trump undertook a four-day tour of the Gulf, including the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, which was marked by the signing of energy and AI agreements. Leading U.S. companies in the sector, such as OpenAI, Nvidia, and Oracle, are developing a massive data center in Abu Dhabi in partnership with G42, and Amazon has become Humain’s main partner.

Theoretically, the location of technological infrastructure shouldn’t be as constrained as that of oil and gas, but as AI begins to expand on a large scale, the enormous data centers it relies on have become concentrated to make the massive supply of energy and connectivity they require more efficient. The recent attacks by Iran, however, have exposed their vulnerability and will force a rethink of how to protect them.

Nevertheless, Soliman believes the Gulf’s strategic ambitions will remain unaffected. “Iran’s decision to attack this infrastructure is the clearest sign that the Gulf’s AI ambitions are real and have consequences: military resources aren’t dedicated to hitting things that don’t matter,” he argues. “Their miscalculation,” he suggests, “is thinking that sovereign wealth funds with 50-year investment horizons will be scared off by a drone attack.”

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