ICE sued after making house calls for online critics

A few hours after checking into a hotel in New York City, David Streever woke up to a call from the front desk saying someone was looking for him.

Streever had just landed on a return trip from Finland, where he’d vacationed with his daughter. Though Streever didn’t know it yet, while he’d been away, agents with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) had shown up to his home in Rochester and spoken to his wife. They dropped off a “WARNING NOTICE,” which informed Streever that ICE’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) is “responsible for enforcing crimes against the United States,” including “threats made against ICE personnel.” Then, nearly as soon as he touched US soil, another agent tracked him down at his hotel.

In a lawsuit filed in federal court in Washington, DC, Streever says he didn’t threaten anyone. Shortly after federal agents killed two US citizens in Minneapolis, Streever emailed Todd Lyons, at the time the acting director of ICE. “You are a monstrous human being and will go down in history as America’s Reinhard Heydrich, the butcher,” Streever’s message read in part. “Even Trump will turn on you before the end, and you will be a sad, despised man who eats himself alive with shame at your own pathetic weakness.” The message castigated Lyons, warning him of his “downfall” — but the consequence, it said, would be “the burden of knowing the truth about yourself.”

Streever wasn’t arrested over the message. But the notice warned him that it “MAY BE IN VIOLATION OF FEDERAL LAW.”

The warning Streever received isn’t an isolated incident. For much of the past year, DHS has been going after people who criticize President Donald Trump’s immigration policies in emails and social media posts, accusing them of threatening federal personnel or “doxing” agents whose identities are already known to the public. OPR has opened more than 100 investigations into “incidents of doxing and threats” involving ICE, Wired reported this week. Unlike the recent arrests and prosecutions of so-called antifa members, no criminal charges have apparently been filed in these cases — but especially against the backdrop of a larger crackdown, the threat to civil liberties is clear.

“I think that everyone would instantly recognize it as a First Amendment violation if the police showed up and arrested someone for this email. But the First Amendment doesn’t just cover arrests — it also prohibits government retaliation or coercion,” said Adam Steinbaugh, a senior attorney with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression who is representing Streever.

Steinbaugh doesn’t know how DHS tracked Streever down to his hotel, but noted that the department regularly asks web platforms to help identify critics. Since at least last August, DHS has sent several hundred administrative subpoenas to companies like Google, Reddit, Discord, and Meta asking for the names, email addresses, phone numbers, and other identifying information of people who criticize ICE online, according to The New York Times.

“There is a broader pattern of the federal government using dubious legal resources or tools to deter speech,” Steinbaugh said.

In a statement to The Verge, DHS spokesperson Lauren Bis said the department does not comment on ongoing investigations. “Any allegation DHS and its components are attempting to ‘squash’ free speech is categorically FALSE. ICE investigates all credible threats towards its employees and officers, including threats to the ICE Director,” Bis said. “Anyone who assaults or threatens our law enforcement officers will face the consequences.”

The same day that they spoke to Streever’s wife, ICE special agents David Brodie and Abbi Henry confronted Paigelynne Gonyea, a Syracuse woman, while she was working at a polling place. Brodie and Henry gave her a warning notice similar to the one Streever received, accusing her of publicly posting personal information about federal officers. Gonyea told The Associated Press that she believed the warning was related to a January social media post she made about Jonathan Ross, the ICE agent who shot Renee Good.

Gonyea said she told DHS agents to meet her at the polling place after receiving a voicemail saying they wanted to talk to her about “a post that we believe you made on Instagram where you doxxed an ICE agent back in January.”

DHS has repeatedly claimed that identifying federal agents — even those whose identity, like Ross’, is already publicly known — is a form of doxxing. “Doxxing federal law enforcement officers is a federal crime that puts their lives and their families in serious danger,” DHS spokesperson Bis told The Associated Press.

But reports suggest that DHS is conflating criticism and threats. Last year, agents questioned a 67-year-old retiree living in the Philadelphia suburbs about an email he sent to Joseph Dernbach, the lead ICE prosecutor on a deportation case of an Afghan refugee identified in a Washington Post article as “Mr. H.”

“Mr. Dernbach, don’t play Russian roulette with H’s life,” the man, identified as Jon, wrote, according to The Washington Post. “Err on the side of caution. There’s a reason the US government along with many other governments don’t recognise the Taliban. Apply principles of common sense and decency.”

A few minutes later, Jon received an email from Google saying DHS had requested information related to his account. And a little over two weeks after that, two plainclothes DHS agents showed up to his house with a local police officer. They had a printout of his email. The agents reportedly agreed that the email Jon sent wasn’t illegal, but said the mentions of “Russian roulette” and “the Taliban” could be construed as threats.

Beyond equating criticism and threats, DHS claims that “doxing” agents puts their lives at risk, and says that the threat of being identified is why they cover their faces and don’t wear badges labeling them as law enforcement. In March, DHS claimed there was an 8,000 percent increase in threats made against its agents and that assaults had increased by more than 1,300 percent, figures Bis reiterated in her email to The Verge. In a statement issued at the time, Bis implied that people who compare ICE to Nazis were to blame for these assaults. “Comparing ICE day-in and day-out to the Nazi Gestapo, the Secret Police, and slave patrols has consequences,” Bis said in March.

Aaron Mackey, the deputy legal director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said that there are types of speech that can be considered threats — such as telling people rallying outside a government building to break in and set fire to it — but calling someone a Nazi doesn’t meet that legal standard. “Just calling someone a Nazi, which is an age-old epithet that is protected by the First Amendment, is not in the same universe as incitement, which is not protected by the First Amendment,” Mackey told The Verge.

An NPR analysis found that there aren’t nearly as many assaults of ICE agents as DHS claims. But DHS has used these dubious statistics to justify its own violence against civilians.

Last October, Border Patrol agent Charles Exum shot Marimar Martinez, a US citizen, while on patrol in Chicago as part of DHS’s Operation Midway Blitz. Martinez had been following Exum’s unmarked vehicle around the Brighton Park neighborhood, recording the incident on her phone and shouting “La migra! La migra!” out her window to alert people to the DHS presence.

Exum later claimed that Martinez had rammed his vehicle with her car; he bragged about the shooting in a Signal chat, according to court records reviewed by The New Yorker. Martinez, who survived the shooting, was charged with assaulting, impeding, and interfering with a federal law enforcement officer, and faced up to 20 years in prison if found guilty. But the agency was apparently already tracking her, though it’s unclear if the shooting was connected to that. Five days before Martinez was shot, a Customs and Border Protection team reportedly shared her name, photo, and social media account with agents in Chicago, and said she was “encouraging the doxxing” of agents by sharing posts about them on social media.

The government ultimately asked to drop the case, and the charges against her were dismissed with prejudice. Afterward, DHS released a statement calling Martinez a domestic terrorist.

Internal communications reviewed by The New Yorker said that Martinez’s information had been verified on DHS databases — but a department spokesperson told the publication that “there is NO database of ‘domestic terrorists’ run by DHS,” adding that DHS does monitor and investigate threats against its agents. In other words, DHS has denied that it has a dedicated domestic terrorism database, but it hasn’t denied keeping tabs on what it considers threats — which seemingly includes criticisms made online. Congressional Democrats have been trying to get more information about these lists, but DHS hasn’t complied, according to recent reporting by Mother Jones.

Whether or not a specific database exists, administration officials have accused critics of engaging in terrorism. White House adviser Stephen Miller called Alex Pretti a “would-be domestic terrorist” after he was killed by federal agents. Last year, Trump designated “antifa” a domestic terror organization. This June, while sentencing a man who shot an agent after a protest outside ICE’s Texas Prairieland Detention Center, a federal judge handed down decades-long sentences to several others uninvolved in the shooting — including people with no ties to the shooter who left before the incident or didn’t attend the protest at all, all of whom the government claimed were connected to an “antifa cell.”

And that same month, federal prosecutors in Minnesota indicted 15 people on charges including conspiracy to impede or injure a federal officer, solicitation to commit a crime of violence, assault on a federal officer, and the destruction of federal property. Prosecutors claim that these 15 people are connected to “antifa.” The 94-page indictment accuses the defendants of property violence and mentions that one of them wrote for an “anarchist blog.”

The sum total of these efforts is to conflate dissent and crime — implying that anyone who criticizes or protests Trump’s immigration policies is endangering the lives of federal law enforcement officers.

“Even when there are specific acts of violence where federal officials are being targeted, we’re seeing the federal government reach much broadly beyond that to also prosecute people who are very far removed from that context and that criminal conduct in a way that does chill speech,” Mackey, the EFF attorney, said. Streever and Gonyea may not be facing criminal charges or prison time, but the government is still trying to shut them up.