Activists used pots and pans to protest ICE. They were investigated for terrorism.
The Trump administration reportedly spied on left-leaning groups during immigration protests in Minnesota.
Newly released files show that federal authorities opened a terrorism probe in Minnesota that ended up targeting ordinary protesters whose weapons of choice were wooden spoons and cookware.
This winter, young climate activists in Minnesota stood outside hotels where ICE agents were being housed, banging pots and pans. The protesters kept agents awake at night, and they also urged the hotels not to do business with DHS. The group called these clever pop-up activations “wide awakes,” launched amidst an immigration crackdown that saw the murder of U.S. citizens, illegal detentions, and widespread government misconduct. In short, it was the kind of activity Americans have engaged in since the founding, somewhere between a picket line and a cowbell.
What the activists didn’t know is that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was spying on them under the auspices of a broader federal inquiry, justified partly on grounds of “domestic terrorism.”
According to newly released government documents reported by the New York Times, DHS opened the secret investigation out of its St. Paul office in late January, four days after a Border Patrol agent shot and killed Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old nurse who was filming officers during the immigration crackdown. Rather than investigate the agents who killed Pretti, federal authorities set out to probe the protest movement itself, including labor unions, community organizers, and a climate group called the Sunrise Movement, which we featured on DEFIANCE Daily just a few months ago.
What followed was expansive surveillance. According to the Times, this included the seizure of some of the groups’ financial records, the infiltration of Signal chats, and in-person spying on organizers who were putting together the types of protests with which the Sunrise Movement and area residents made headlines. Indeed, undercover agents infiltrated activists’ internal meetings at libraries, public parks, and in churches, recording not just what people said but who they were.
At one training session in a church meeting room in Roseville, Minnesota, agents wrote down attendees’ license plate numbers, matched the plates to their owners’ names, scraped their social media, and compiled what they called an “intel work-up” on each person. In the course of such monitoring, DHS put together dossiers on ordinary teachers, veterans, and union members who were challenging the president’s violent, anti-immigration agenda.
In another instance, investigators scrutinized three years of wire transfers from the nation’s largest health care workers union under the heading of “domestic terrorist financing.” Prosecutors then showed a grand jury a PowerPoint asserting that eighteen organizations, including the AFL-CIO, the Democratic Socialists of America, a state teachers’ union, and a small Minneapolis bike shop called the Grease Pit, were part of a conspiracy against ICE. No such charges have been filed against those organizations.
Internally, DHS branded one leg of the effort as “Operation Puppet Master.”
In June, the investigation produced an indictment of fifteen people and was announced with great fanfare by the Trump administration as a takedown of “antifa” — the group the administration has designated as the leading terror threat to the United States. The alleged offenses included throwing ice chunks at ICE vehicles. While such infractions may or may not result in actual convictions, observers were quick to point out that the case was a far cry from DHS’s post-9/11 efforts to thwart bombings, mass shootings, airplane hijackings, and other nefarious plots from actual terrorist organizations like al Qaeda and ISIS.
(The federal judge overseeing the proceedings has already ruled that the activity at the heart of the supposed conspiracy, following ICE vehicles and reporting where they go, is not grounds for arrest.)
What’s just as alarming as the terrorism allegations is that investigators went beyond looking into mere individuals and conducted surreptitious monitoring of left-leaning organization — groups that helped organize tens of thousands of Minnesotans to stand up for their rights. None has been accused of a crime. Yet the groups were evidently subpoenaed, surveilled, and infiltrated by federal agents.
The Times report quotes Harry Jacobs, one of the federal prosecutors who resigned in protest from the U.S. attorney’s office in Minnesota that oversaw these investigations, blasting the Trump administration’s misconduct:
“The government’s power to investigate is extraordinary, and with that power comes a responsibility to exercise care and restraint…An investigation should begin with a legitimate basis to suspect criminal conduct, not with a chosen institution or group. Prosecutors must follow the facts and the law wherever they lead, rather than select a target and work backwards to build a case.”
Evidence now appears to show DHS doing exactly that. The paper trail paints a picture of agents who targeted left-wing groups because of their viewpoint on Trump’s immigration crackdown, without evidence of criminal conduct, and who then went on a fishing expedition within those groups to find possible infractions they could try to prosecute.
I spent years at DHS and have worked with almost every head of the department, under Democratic and Republican administrations. Until Trump’s first term, few of them would’ve been caught dead overseeing an investigation like this. The responsible agents would’ve been suspended or fired. The conduct would’ve been reported to Congress. And departmental leaders would’ve seen it, rightfully, as a chilling violation of free speech. No longer. In story after story, we are witnessing the slide of DHS down a slippery slope into becoming the warden of a burgeoning police state.
The Times piece invoked a similar episode in our history, known as Cointelpro. That was J. Edgar Hoover’s program of infiltrating and cataloguing left-wing activists, which was so notorious that Congress spent decades building guardrails to prevent other such flagrant violations of civil liberties from happening again. Those guardrails have now failed. And anyone tempted to treat Minnesota as a one-off should look at the paper trail.
This all flows from a presidential directive signed by Donald Trump last year, National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7), which ordered a whole-of-government campaign against what the administration labels “domestic terrorism,” including groups with “anti-American,” “anti-capitalist,” and “anti-Christian” views. Prosecutors and agents across the country are now under pressure to enforce NSPM-7 and make it their top professional priority. One of my oft-repeated concerns is that the extent of this major abuse of power is being kept classified, as terror investigations are treated as the most sensitive national security cases.
What we don’t know yet is how far the rot has spread. Minnesota is just where the documents leaked into public view. The real question (the same one I asked last week about the warrantless tracking of James Comey), is how many other groups and how many other ordinary Americans are being secretly catalogued right now for constitutionally protected speech? The government will not volunteer the answer. We know that. And we only know about Operation Puppet Master because defense lawyers pried the records loose from the administration.
So let me tell you what we’re doing about it. This month, DEFIANCE.org launched the real Anti-Weaponization Fund, built to support the targets of exactly this kind of presidential revenge, and as of this writing we are actively exploring how to team up with other pro-democracy groups to protect protesters’ rights and counter these violations in court. The lesson readers should not take away is that protesting is dangerous; it’s that protests are working, so well in fact that they’re terrifying the regime. Indeed, when the federal government assigns undercover agents to a pots-and-pans demonstration, it’s telling you that it really can’t stand the noise.
Thankfully, federal judges are getting fed up with an administration that is increasingly abusing DOJ and DHS powers. I have faith in the justice system in the long run. I have faith that the wrongly accused will be vindicated. But I won’t rely on faith alone. That’s why every week at DEFIANCE.org we do something about it.
The current president of the United States wants Americans to think twice before joining a group chat, attending a training at a church, or banging a pot outside a hotel in protest of his administration. The answer to him is more noise, not less. So while this story continues to unfold, my advice to you is: keep on banging.
Your friend, in defiance,
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