DHS's abuse of power in Minnesota was even worse than we knew
It's the stuff of East Germany.
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When the Department of Justice indicted 15 Minnesotans earlier this summer, it was painfully clear that this was a cobbled-together mess, a transparent attempt to criminalize dissent. But boy, we didn’t know the half of it.
Now, thanks to those defendants prying loose some discovery from the government, we know just how far the administration is willing to go — and it’s really, really grim, even by Trumpian standards.
The indictment itself was jaw-dropping for how it strung together objectively legal, nonviolent actions like organizing protests or tracking ICE vehicles, somehow hoping if they stacked up enough of those, it magically added up to illegal antifa violence.
What we didn’t know at the time, though, was that the administration had engaged in utterly unprecedented surveillance in service of its theory that somehow everyone in Minnesota was engaged in a vast criminal conspiracy to make ICE thugs feel sad. As part of these efforts, the government also demanded multiple years of records from trade unions and nonprofit groups for what it said was a financial investigation into “domestic terrorist financing.”
You honestly can’t get a sense of how unhinged this all was without looking at the little graphic Homeland Security Investigations put together showing this alleged web of conspiracy:
Even if we were to pretend this nonsense actually showed some meaningful joint effort by 18 different groups comprising hundreds of thousands of people nationwide to conspire to thwart ICE, none of that would explain the scope of the records HSI demanded.
For example, the administration used this theory, such as it was, to get several years’ worth of wire transfer records for the Service Employees International Union. It would be pretty intense if SEIU could be said to be part of this vast ongoing conspiracy, given that it’s a nationwide union with two million members. HSI also demanded donations and PAC spending information from the Communications Workers of America dating back to 2023. Yes, apparently CWA, which represents 700,000 workers worldwide, had actually been secretly funding nefarious anti-ICE terrorists, but somehow allegedly started some three years before ICE terrorized Minnesota.
If you’re wondering how the Department of Justice got these subpoenas past a federal judge, they didn’t.
Presumption of (ir)regularity
Normally, the FBI would investigate this alleged sprawling conspiracy, and after gathering enough evidence, the DOJ would go to a judge and get a warrant. But here, HSI was the investigating agency, and therefore they used administrative subpoenas.
Administrative subpoenas are a neat trick, a way for the most corrupt, most anti-American, most anti-First Amendment administration to avoid even the modest requirement of getting a judge to sign off. Instead, HSI just issued its own summons, requiring financial institutions to produce years of records with no real justification necessary. Oh, and those institutions were told that they couldn’t disclose anything “for an indefinite period of time” because “any such disclosure will impede the investigation and thereby interfere with the enforcement of federal law.”
That language is actually standard for this sort of summons, but the way the Trump administration treats it is anything but. Its stance is that any opposition to the murderous antics of federal thugs is actually interfering with federal law. That was the justification for federalizing the California National Guard last year. Per the administration, Los Angeles anti-ICE protests were actually an organized, violent rebellion that prevented federal agents from enforcing the law.
You can trace the evolution of this strategy over the last year, where literally any opposition to the murderous antics of federal thugs is framed as a crime. And you can also see how every time the administration suffers a setback, it moves on to a new city, a new theory, a new line of attack, endlessly inventive.
After his success in federalizing the National Guard in California, Trump tried to replicate it in Portland, Oregon, and Chicago, Illinois, but to no avail. In October, a federal appeals court upheld the lower court’s decision blocking Trump from sending Guard troops into Illinois, saying there was no evidence the protests were a “coordinated assault by violent groups” that were engaging in “intimidation and sabotage” against ICE. And a month later, a different federal judge permanently barred Trump from deploying National Guard troops in Oregon because it was clear those protests were not a rebellion and weren’t hampering ICE.
Trump ran to the Supreme Court to whine about the unfairness of it all, but they handed him a rare loss on December 23 of last year when they left the lower court’s block in place.
Clearly, what Trump took away from this setback was that he couldn’t rely on roving federalized National Guard troops and he’d need to do something different to bring blue cities and states to heel. So his comprehensive assault on Minnesota was undertaken by flooding the state with federal agents rather than relying on the more complicated and dicey Guard scheme.
You might have forgotten how quickly ICE’s surge into Minnesota devolved into violence. On January 6, 2006, 2,000 ICE agents descended on the state. The very next day, an ICE agent murdered Renee Good in broad daylight, in front of a crowd of people, in cold blood. Apparently, that somehow impeded federal law enforcement, because the DOJ then pushed to investigate Good and her widow for Good’s crime of getting in the way of an ICE agent’s bullets.
One week later, ICE agent Christian Castro shot a Venezuelan immigrant, Julio Sosa-Celis, through a closed door, hitting him in the leg. Relying on lies from Castro and lies from the FBI agent ostensibly investigating the matter, US Attorney Daniel Rosen’s office charged Sosa-Celis and another immigrant, Alfredo Aljorna, for their non-attack on Castro.
That case fell apart so hard that not only did Rosen’s office dismiss the charges, but Hennepin County later charged Castro criminally when CCTV video showed there was no attack whatsoever, just Castro recklessly firing at a fleeing Sosa-Celis.
And then 10 days later, two CBP agents executed Alex Pretti as he lay defenseless on the ground.
Having federal thugs murder two people and shoot a third in under three weeks apparently caused a reckoning within the administration, but it was precisely the opposite of what it should have been. Rather than pulling back to regroup and figure out how to stop ICE agents from popping off and murdering people whenever they wanted, instead, just four days after Pretti’s murder, HSI kicked off “Operation Puppet Master,” the blindingly stupid name for this mass surveillance machine, premised on the idea that the ICE goons were the real victims here, victims of a deep-pocketed violent conspiracy:
“[V]iolent opportunists (VOs) have exploited the protests as cover to attempt breaches of federal properties and have perpetrated multiple assaults against federal officers tasked with protecting these facilities.... HSI St. Paul has identified an organized network of conspirators operating through online and in person who are providing material support to violent opportunists and agitators involved in impeding federal law enforcement, rioting, destruction of Federal property and assaults on Federal agents and Officers.”
If any of that were true, the indictment of the Minnesota 15 would have contained far more evidence of this. But at best, what they were able to come up with is that one person brake-checked an ICE vehicle that was following her and another kicked an ICE vehicle and knocked an ICE agent’s notebook out of his hands.
On the one hand, murders. On the other, notebooks on the ground. Totally the same.
The American Stasi
While this was always about criminalizing dissent, this mass surveillance scheme adds a new, distressing component.
All HSI has to do if it wants to go spelunking through years of union finances — or any other sort of left-leaning group — is to vaguely say that they support domestic terrorism and are part of a vast conspiracy.
Donated money to keep people safe while ICE was terrorizing the state? Conspiracy. Attended deescalation training specifically about, well, deescalating conflict? Conspiracy. Have a website that has articles about “ICE OUT”? Conspiracy. Attended No Kings protests? Conspiracy. Met at a church to talk with other anti-ICE activists for an art club event? Conspiracy.
At a church in Roseville, Minnesota, HSI captured license plates and used that information to obtain the names of all the attendees, then searched social media and compiled a full intel workup, all for being in a church meeting room talking about ICE.
Undercover agents also surveilled people at the University Baptist Church in Dinkytown, a neighborhood near the University of Minnesota campus. One problem? There’s an injunction barring DHS and other agencies from taking any “immigration enforcement action” against an alliance of Baptist churches of which University Baptist is a part. That order bans “arrest, seizure, search, interrogation, questioning, interview or investigation,” but that didn’t dissuade HSI at all.
It’s very tempting to whistle past the graveyard here, to say that, much like what happened to the Broadview 6, eventually the Minnesota 15 will crack open the grand jury testimony and have a path forward to get this thing tossed.
Indeed, what we do know about the grand jury already shows that it was chock-full of lies. HSI agent Desmond Garcia told the grand jury, “No one is ever investigated or looked at or even researched on for First Amendment-protected activities.” But HSI literally spied on people hanging out in a church parking lot. They decided that unions were somehow engaged in a crime if they support something Trump doesn’t like. This whole thing is an assault on the First Amendment.
The Broadview defendants eventually walked away, but they owed hundreds of thousands in legal fees for the several months it took. Sure, the DOJ says they are not opposing a fee request, an attempt to bring the case to an end without having to reveal more grand jury shenanigans, but that payoff, no matter what it is, doesn’t undo the months Broadview defendants spent in limbo, felonies hanging over their heads.
And unfortunately, after the verdicts in Dallas, where eight of nine anti-ICE protesters were found guilty of “providing material support to terrorists,” it just isn’t possible for defendants caught up in this sort of thing to be chill. Elizabeth Soto made zines and was part of a leftist book club, and that counted as “material support,” so she was sentenced to 50 years in prison.
And as far as nonprofits, churches, and unions? They run the risk of being the next Southern Poverty Law Center, indicted on charges of fraud and money laundering for doing the thing they’ve always openly done: paying informants to infiltrate the Ku Klux Klan and other racist right-wing groups, dismantling them bit by bit.
This isn’t just meant to stop liberals from dissenting or engaging in anti-ICE activism. It’s meant to deprive people of vital connections, like their churches and union halls. The administration is making every interaction liberals and leftists have a fretful one, always shadowed by the worry that it will lead to criminal charges.
It’s meant to destroy trust among activists, who must now constantly worry about whether HSI has infiltrated them. It’s meant to drive out of public life anyone the administration disfavors. It’s meant to enshrine violence as a tool of the state, one which you cannot fight back against or even discuss in anything but a laudatory fashion.
It’s a world created by wreckers, gleefully tearing down institutions and people and cities in the name of nothing but murderous xenophobia. They may have the money and the power, but they’ll never have the joy and the fierceness to build something together. But we do.
That’s it for today
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And what’s with this new a-word, “antifa”? Why isn’t the chaotic Trump called an anarchist?
East Germany? Why, that’s Vlad’s old stomping grounds! Coinky-dink?