DHS Sent Undercover Agents to Churches, Libraries, and a Self-Defense Class to Spy on ICE Protesters

License Plates at Sunday Meetings, Dossiers on Innocent People

According to court documents filed as part of an ongoing conspiracy case against ICE protesters, the scope of DHS surveillance in the Twin Cities was, in the words of one expert, "breathtaking." NPR reports that federal agents secretly recorded meetings at churches, libraries, restaurants, and schools for months. They infiltrated private group chats. They sought the financial records of national labor unions. They compiled information on community members who had not been accused of any crime.

At Prince of Peace Lutheran Church in Roseville, an undercover DHS agent attended an anti-ICE organizing meeting in February. The agent catalogued license plates in the parking lot and then built dossiers on attendees, including their names, home addresses, and information about their families and jobs. The pastor, Steve Sylvester, learned about this a few days before having to stand at his own altar and tell his mostly elderly congregation they had been spied on. "It feels weird," Sylvester told NPR. "It feels like I'm living in 1950s Eastern Europe."

At University Baptist Church in Minneapolis, an undercover agent wore a recording device to a self-defense class in May. At a public library, according to NPR, an undercover agent allegedly told someone he worked in construction, could build things for "direct action," and that he didn't mind going to jail. That last part is worth sitting with. A federal agent, while conducting secret surveillance of a group meeting in a library, apparently floated the idea of building things for direct action and going to jail. The word for that is not surveillance. The word for that is provocation.

What COINTELPRO Looks Like When You Dress It in a New Acronym

Rachel Levinson-Waldman, who directs the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, told NPR the tactics described in these documents seem to break from decades of norms and guidelines at the Justice Department. She compared them to COINTELPRO, the FBI's domestic counterintelligence program that ran from the 1950s through the early 1970s.

COINTELPRO, if you need a refresher, was the program under which the federal government surveilled and actively disrupted the Communist Party, the Black Panthers, and civil rights leaders including Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. It was exposed, condemned, and eventually led to significant reforms and tighter restrictions on exactly this kind of investigative overreach. The reason those reforms exist is because the government did this before and it was a catastrophe for civil liberties.

Levinson-Waldman is careful to note that whether this Minnesota surveillance was technically legal under the Fourth Amendment remains an open question. But she also says this, which should be printed and taped to every federal agency door in America: "Just because something's legal doesn't mean that it aligns with people's sense of what is ethical or what they're comfortable with having the government doing." That's a polite way of saying you can be within the law and still be behaving like authoritarians.

The Government's Defense Is That It Only Spied on the People It Was Spying On

The government filed a response in court on Friday, according to NPR, arguing that it did not target the thousands of peaceful protesters in Minnesota. Instead, it said, it targeted only the specific individuals who were ultimately charged in the conspiracy case.

This is a defense in the same way that "I only broke the windows I meant to break" is a defense. Those dossiers with names, addresses, family information, and job details? Those were built from license plates captured at a church meeting. The people whose plates were run, whose families were researched, whose workplaces were logged, were not charged with anything. They showed up to a meeting at a church. The government's own court documents are the ones describing the scope of this operation. The government cannot simultaneously file paperwork revealing the breadth of its surveillance and then claim it only targeted a narrow group of suspects.

Sergio Manancero, the general manager of La Doña Cerveceria in Minneapolis, where an undercover agent attended a meeting in January, told NPR he understood why the government might have sent someone. The meeting was open to the public. But he also said the organizers were planning a lawful protest, and that in some odd way he found it almost reassuring that DHS agents were present to witness firsthand that nothing sinister was happening. That is an extraordinarily generous read of a situation where the government decided a brewery meeting about a legal protest required a secret federal informant.

A Congregation Told Their Church Was a Surveillance Target

The human dimension of this story is easy to lose in the legal abstractions. Steve Sylvester had to stand up in front of his congregation on a Sunday morning and tell them the federal government had been watching them. Cody Sanders, interim pastor at University Baptist Church in Minneapolis, told NPR his first reaction was surprise, then anger, then worry about what it would do to his community going forward.

"I do imagine people will look over their shoulder a little more," Sanders said, "and wonder, 'Is there someone here who's trying to gather information?'" He said he hoped his community could resist the suspicion this kind of revelation tends to generate. That is a pastor asking his congregation to maintain their faith in community after the federal government sent a wired informant to their self-defense class. The damage is not just to the individuals surveilled. It is to the fabric of the communities themselves, which is, historically, exactly the point of this kind of operation.