A US citizen sent a strongly worded email to ICE's acting director calling him mean names and predicting he'd die filled with shame. ICE's response was to dispatch federal officers to the man's home while he was on vacation in Finland. This is the country we live in now.
The Email That Launched a Federal Operation
David Streever, a Rochester, New York resident, sent a three-paragraph email in January to Todd Lyons, then acting director of ICE. He sent it after watching video of an immigration officer fatally shoot Minneapolis resident Renee Good during an anti-ICE demonstration. The email called Lyons 'a monstrous human being' and compared him to Reinhard Heydrich, the Nazi war criminal. It predicted Lyons would 'never know peace' and would 'torment himself until his last day on Earth.'
That's it. That was the whole thing. Three paragraphs. No physical threats. No specific plans. No weapons. A man, watching what he believed was an execution on video, sat down and wrote a furious political email to a government official. As Americans have done since the founding of the republic.
According to The Guardian, federal officers showed up at Streever's Rochester home in June, months after the email was sent, and presented his wife with a warning notice. Streever was literally in Finland at the time. They also apparently tracked him to a hotel in New York City when he returned from overseas and attempted to confront him there, but hotel staff turned them away. Hotel staff. Had to be turned away by a front desk.
What 'Threat' Actually Looks Like Under This Administration
The government's position, as The Guardian reports, is that Streever's email constituted a threat serious enough to warrant dispatching federal officers across multiple locations. Let's hold that up to the light for a second.
The email contained no mention of violence. It contained no specific plans. It was a prediction that a man would be consumed by guilt and historical shame, wrapped in the kind of rhetoric you'd find in any opinion column from any major newspaper in any given week. 'You will torment yourself until your last day on Earth' is something a disappointed parent says. It is not a federal matter.
The Philadelphia-based Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression filed suit Monday in Washington DC on Streever's behalf. Attorney Adam Steinbaugh was direct about it: 'This is very clearly within the protection of the first amendment. It was in the context of political speech.' The lawsuit also names Markwayne Mullin, the secretary of homeland security, which oversees ICE.
The Administration's Defense Is Itself Kind of Incredible
Mullin's office released a statement in response that said any allegation that DHS was trying to 'squash' free speech was 'categorically FALSE.' The statement then added, without apparent irony: 'Anyone who assaults or threatens our law enforcement officers will face the consequences.'
Read that again. They denied suppressing free speech in the same breath they used to justify suppressing free speech by treating an email as an assault. That's not a defense. That's a circular argument wrapped in a press release.
ICE declined to comment on the warning to Streever when reporters initially asked, citing an 'ongoing investigation.' An ongoing investigation. Into an email. Into a man predicting that a government official would feel bad about himself someday.
Streever Is Not the Only One
The Guardian reports that Streever is one of at least two upstate New York residents who received federal warnings in June after criticizing ICE online. The other is Paigelynne Gonyea, a poll worker who was visited by federal agents at a voting location during New York's primaries.
Gonyea believes the visit stemmed from a social media post she made in January that read 'I think today is a great day for Jonathan to be indicted,' alongside a picture of Jonathan Ross, the ICE officer who shot and killed Renee Good. Ross had already been publicly identified by news outlets at that point.
A DHS spokesperson claimed Gonyea had shared the officer's home address in a separate post and said she 'committed a federal crime by posting the address of an ICE law enforcement officer online.' That part of the post was redacted in the image the spokesperson shared. The New York attorney general's office confirmed it is aware of both cases and has been reviewing the encounter between Gonyea and federal agents at the polling location, according to The Guardian.
The Bigger Picture Here
The shooting of Renee Good in Minneapolis was caught on video and sparked significant public outrage. It is the context in which both Streever and Gonyea made their statements. That context matters enormously, because the government's response to public criticism of a fatal shooting by one of its officers has apparently been to track down the critics and show up at their homes.
The chilling effect this is designed to produce is not subtle. You don't send federal agents to a man's house for a three-paragraph email because you genuinely believe he's dangerous. You do it so the next person who wants to write an angry email thinks twice. You do it so the next poll worker who posts something critical does the math and decides it isn't worth it.
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression has taken on Streever's case. The New York attorney general's office is watching. Whether any of that is enough to push back against a federal agency apparently willing to use its resources to respond to constituent complaints about its own conduct remains, unfortunately, an open question.
The Dingo Take
Let's be very clear about what happened here. A government agency shot and killed a civilian on video. A citizen watched the video, got angry, and sent a furious email to the agency's director saying he was going to feel bad about it. The agency then used federal resources to track that citizen to his home, his wife, and a hotel lobby. That is the sequence of events. That is what we are normalizing.
The First Amendment does not have a carve-out for emails that make government officials feel compared to Nazi war criminals. Political speech that criticizes government actors, even harshly, even with historical analogies, even with predictions of karmic suffering, is exactly the kind of speech the First Amendment was written to protect. This is not complicated. It is day-one constitutional law. The fact that DHS issued a statement calling the free speech concerns 'categorically FALSE' while simultaneously defending the home visits for speech is either breathtaking cynicism or breathtaking stupidity, and neither option is reassuring.
When a government starts sending officers to the homes of citizens who wrote critical emails, you are not living in a country with free speech protections. You are living in a country with free speech theater, where the rights exist on paper while the boots show up at the door. David Streever's lawsuit is one man fighting back. Good for him. The rest of us should be paying very close attention to how this turns out.
