US government spied on anti-ICE protesters, unions, records show

How the US government spied on anti-ICE protesters and their unions

To understand why any of this was happening, a reader needs to go back to January. Operation Metro Surge, the largest single-state immigration enforcement operation the country has seen, had already put more than 2,000 ICE officers and 1,000 Customs and Border Protection agents onto the streets of the Twin Cities. On 7 January, an ICE agent shot and killed Renée Good, 37, a mother of three, in her car as she left an area where people had gathered to protest the raids. Three weeks later, on 24 January, federal officers shot dead Alex Pretti, 37, an intensive care nurse who had been filming agents and stepped in after they pushed a woman to the ground.

Those two deaths are why the organising happened. Community groups, unions and churches mobilised against a deployment that would go on to make an estimated 3,789 arrests, the great majority of people with no criminal record, despite Homeland Security’s public claims to be removing “the worst of the worst.” DHS opened a covert investigation the same month Good was killed. It called it Operation Puppet Master.

What that investigation did, according to the reports Riach has now produced, went well beyond watching a protest. Undercover agents attended community meetings in the Twin Cities and a virtual session in New York on “ICE brutality” at Hunter College. They got inside Signal groups. They recorded a boxing and sparring session held as physical training in a church gym. And DHS used administrative subpoenas, which need no judge’s sign-off, to pull wire-transfer and financial records from SEIU, the Communications Workers of America and the Sunrise Movement.

At a Sunrise Movement “resistance skills” session at a Minneapolis public library on 31 January, an undercover agent listened to organisers discuss police liaisons and safety marshals, then offered his own construction skills to help build items for “more direct-action protests,” telling the group that going to jail did not bother him and handing out his phone number. Riach’s filing calls this what it looks like: an agent trying to entice people into committing the crime his own agency was investigating. That is his client’s characterisation, made in an adversarial court filing, not an independent finding, but the underlying document is now public and the government has not disputed what it recorded.

Unions on the receiving end

Paul Kirk-Davidoff, on the executive board of UFCW Local 663, says members noticed people taking notes at meetings who had no obvious reason to be there. Minnesota AFL-CIO president Bernie Burnham called the grand jury’s conspiracy theory “unhinged,” and said the labour movement is “being targeted simply because our state’s Labor Movement stood in solidarity with our immigrant union members and neighbors.” CWA Local 7250 president Kieran Knutson put it more bluntly: the union will “never apologize or back down because of these dirty tricks and intimidation.” Unidos MN executive director Emilia Gonzalez Avalos says her organisation stopped asking people not to record its trainings and instead let officers stay, because the work is “entirely grounded in the United States constitution” and the group has “nothing to hide.”

That confidence rests on what the indictment itself actually says, and it is thinner than DHS’s language suggests. The Justice Department’s own press release names the 15 defendants as members of “a Minneapolis-based direct action group with Antifa ties.” But the 94-page indictment contains no allegation that any specific federal officer was injured, and no serious-violence charge against any of the 15. Twelve face conspiracy to impede a federal officer, a charge carrying up to six years; three face additional counts including interstate stalking and destruction of government property. Mike German, a former FBI undercover agent now at the Brennan Center for Justice, says it is unusual for DHS rather than the FBI to be running an operation like this, and that using subpoenas with no judicial check points to a case built on “guilt by association” rather than evidence.

The legal foundation for the whole operation traces to an executive order Donald Trump signed on 22 September last year, designating “antifa” a domestic terrorist organisation. It was the first time the US government has applied a domestic-terrorism label of that kind to an organisation, and the order cites no statute because none exists for it. DHS has declined to discuss the specifics, telling reporters only that it does not comment on the existence or status of ongoing investigations. That silence means the government’s own defence of the subpoenas and the undercover tactics has not yet been tested in the open.

What happens now

It would be wrong to say the 15 defendants face no allegations at all. Some are accused of specific acts, including one destruction-of-government-property charge and one interstate-stalking charge. What the records show is not that the government invented a case from nothing, but that it built a financial and surveillance dragnet around unions, a climate charity and a socialist organisation that reaches nobody criminally charged with anything, on the strength of an executive order with no statutory basis.

The motion to compel further records has not yet been ruled on, so more of what DHS collected may surface. Minnesota’s state prosecutors are separately suing federal authorities just to get evidence in the killings of Good and Pretti, seven months on. Homeland Security got a template out of Minneapolis: financial subpoenas that need no judge, an undercover presence in union halls and encrypted chats, and a domestic-terrorism label with no law behind it. Unions that had nothing to hide are the ones now being asked to prove it.