Artist: MJ.Hiblen
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At 9:27 this morning, the President walked into the Oval Office, excited to once again be the first to do something. He was almost giddy as he made small talk while the event got underway, his attention captured by the large gold bell sitting on his desk. “I’m going to ring that bell. And does that bell stay in the White House? Because I’m not giving it back. We’re going to put that in the middle of the new ballroom. I’m not going to give that bell back. It looks to me like it’s going to stay here.”
Then he stepped into position in front of the desk, repeatedly pushing into the children who had been strategically placed as he struggled to get himself fully into the cameras’ view. It was another reminder of how completely unaware he seemed of the people around him. The most concerning moment came when he was asked about cryptocurrency. Instead of denying wrongdoing or defending his administration’s actions, the President of the United States casually took credit for federal investigations being dropped, suggesting those who benefited had him to thank. “Every time I see a crypto guy where they dropped an investigation,” Trump said, “I tell them, ‘You’re lucky I’m president.’”
As disturbing as that admission is, it’s who this administration is prosecuting, and who it isn’t, that shows us the dark direction our country is headed. Because on the same day the president boasted about making investigations disappear for the industry that has personally earned him over a billion dollars, we learned more about how one of his own agencies, ICE, was using its investigative power to track down Americans. Going after their fellow citizens who criticize it through intimidation, surveillance, and formal warning notices hand-delivered to their front doors by federal agents. All to discourage dissent.
Today, Wired published an investigation revealing that ICE’s Office of Professional Responsibility, known as OPR, has opened more than 100 cases against Americans accused of what ICE officials call “incidents of doxing and threats” against ICE employees. That might sound reasonable until you understand what OPR actually is. It is ICE’s internal affairs unit. It was created to investigate misconduct, corruption, and abuse of authority by ICE’s own officers. It exists to hold the agency accountable from the inside. It is the office that is supposed to investigate agents who use excessive force, violate civil rights, and break the rules they are sworn to uphold. That is its mandate and purpose. And it is now being aimed outward, at American civilians, for the act of speaking.
That is more than 100 investigations. Not into the agents who shot and killed Alex Pretti, the ICU nurse at the Minneapolis VA. Not into the agents who killed Renée Macklin Good. Or into any of the other dozens of DHS shootings since last July that were prematurely declared justified before investigations were even completed. Not a single federal officer has been held accountable. The office built to police ICE is now being used by ICE to police us.
And we know exactly how they are doing it. Today the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression filed a federal lawsuit in Washington, D.C., on behalf of a man named David Streever. He is a 45-year-old who lives in Rochester, New York. His wife, the Reverend Hilary Streever, is an Episcopal priest. On January 26, after watching federal agents shoot and kill two American citizens in Minneapolis and then watching this administration call those citizens terrorists, David Streever did what Americans have done since the founding of this country. He wrote a letter to the person in charge.
He sent a three-paragraph email to then-acting ICE Director Todd Lyons. The subject line read “What’s next.” He called Lyons a “monstrous human being.” He compared him to a Nazi. He wrote that Lyons would be tormented by his own conscience. He sent it to the government email address. It was raw, it was angry, and it was protected speech under the First Amendment of the United States Constitution.
Five months passed. Nothing happened. And then, while David Streever was on vacation in Finland with his seven-year-old daughter, visiting a children’s theme park called Moomin World, his doorbell camera back home in Rochester picked up something unusual. Two federal agents in blue jackets were standing on his front porch, stepping past children’s toys to ring the bell. They were from Homeland Security Investigations, HSI, the unit built to investigate transnational organized crime, drug trafficking, human trafficking, cybercrime, and terrorism. The unit with access to cell phone location data, credit card transactions, surveillance cameras, and administrative subpoenas to every major tech company in the country. That is the unit they sent to David Streever’s house. For an email.
His wife arrived home still wearing her clergy collar. One of the agents handed her a document. It was printed on official federal stationery from ICE and DHS. Across the top, in underlined capital letters, it read: “WARNING NOTICE.” Below that: “YOU MAY BE IN VIOLATION OF FEDERAL LAW.” It instructed Streever to “promptly remove and/or discontinue” his “behavior” and warned that the notice would be “taken into consideration” if he continued to be involved in “criminal activities.”
His wife told the agents her husband was out of the country with their daughter and would be home Friday. But they did not wait. Just hours after Streever and his daughter landed at JFK International Airport, a third HSI agent tracked him to the airport hotel where they were staying for the night. The agent left a business card at the front desk. His wife had not told the agents which hotel he would be at. They found him anyway.
“Like many Americans, I was deeply upset after the shootings in Minnesota and I felt compelled to do something,” Streever said in a statement. “Writing an email to the head of ICE seemed like the least I could do to express my sense of outrage. I never dreamed it would lead to a knock on my door by federal officers or descending on my hotel in the dark of night.”
FIRE’s senior attorney, Adam Steinbaugh, put it plainly: “If someone is really threatening a government official, you don’t wait five months to act on it. The fact that authorities didn’t respond immediately shows that David presented no threat. This pursuit is designed to intimidate lawful speech, pure and simple.”
And David Streever was not the only one. On the same day agents showed up at his home, June 23, the same two HSI agents visited Paigelynne Gonyea in Syracuse. She was working at a polling place. It was primary election day in New York. They left her a voicemail saying they had just visited her former apartment and were calling about “a post that we believe you made on Instagram.” They presented her with the same kind of warning notice. She refused to sign it. These are the first two cases where Americans have come forward to report receiving formal written warnings from federal agents over their speech. Civil liberties groups say they are the first known instances of DHS using these notices at all. And now there are more than one hundred investigations.
This is how it begins. Not with mass arrests or with news stations going dark overnight. Nor with millions of Americans suddenly losing the right to speak. Authoritarian governments almost never begin there. They begin by making examples out of a few people. They test the public’s tolerance. They watch to see whether fear spreads faster than outrage. They want the next person sitting at their keyboard to hesitate before pressing “Post.” They want us to stop before writing an email to a government official and ask ourselves, “Is this worth someone showing up at my front door?” If they can make enough of us ask that question, they don’t have to outlaw free speech. They can convince us to surrender it ourselves. That is why the architecture of what is happening here is so troubling.
Authoritarian governments focus on silencing dissent and consolidating power. Over the last century, we have seen other regimes follow some version of the same playbook. The Stasi in East Germany did not begin as a tool of mass civilian surveillance. It evolved into one. The Soviet Union’s security apparatus was gradually transformed from policing the state into policing the people. Under Augusto Pinochet in Chile, the institutions that were supposed to protect the public were redirected toward identifying, intimidating, and eliminating political opposition. The pattern is always the same. The office that is supposed to hold power accountable is slowly repurposed to protect those in power from the people they govern. And once that transformation is complete, there is no one left to investigate the investigators. Leaving everyone vulnerable to the whims of the man in charge.
We are watching that transformation happen again. The office that was created to investigate misconduct inside ICE is now investigating Americans who criticize ICE. The First Amendment was never meant to protect speech everyone agrees with. It exists to protect the speech those in power would rather silence. The Founders understood something timeless about human nature. Before a government can undermine elections, intimidate political opponents, or silence a free press, it must first convince ordinary people that speaking honestly is dangerous. That is why freedom of speech was not buried somewhere deeper in the Bill of Rights. It was placed first. They understood that if citizens lose the ability to criticize their government without fear of retaliation, every other liberty eventually becomes negotiable.
That is why tonight’s story is about far more than cryptocurrency or ICE. It is about whether Americans will continue to feel free to tell the truth tomorrow. Because if enough people become afraid to write posts like I do every night, send an email, call a reporter, attend a peaceful protest, or criticize those in power, they won’t need to repeal the First Amendment. It will still exist on paper. It just won’t exist in practice. And once a government discovers it can intimidate its own citizens into silence, history shows it rarely stops there. It pushes further. It tests another boundary. Then another. Until fear becomes the law, even if the Constitution still says otherwise.
So what do we do? We speak. All of us. Right now. Today. They tracked one man across the state of New York for one email. And now they want the rest of us to see that and think twice before saying anything. But here’s what they don’t have the resources to do. They can’t investigate every American who objects to what ICE is doing. They don’t have the bandwidth or the infrastructure. The system of intimidation only works when people are isolated, believe they are alone, and think the cost of speaking is too high and staying quiet is the safer option.
It’s not. It never has been. Silence is how these movements grow. Silence is what they’re counting on. We are not calling for violence against ICE officers. We are not calling for threats against anyone. We are taking a stand against what ICE has become, an agency that has killed American citizens, that is holding people in conditions that violate basic human decency, that has turned its own internal watchdog against the public, and that is using the full weight of federal law enforcement to punish people who say so out loud. We are calling for investigations into what has happened inside those detention facilities. We are calling for accountability for the officers who used lethal force against American citizens. We are calling for this to stop.
And the way we do that is by making it impossible to silence us. Post about it. Write about it. Call your representatives. Put your name on it. Do what David Streever did. Use your voice. Because if millions of Americans speak out at once, they can’t show up at all of our doors. They can intimidate one person. They cannot intimidate a country.
David Streever did not stay silent. He was handed a formal warning suggesting his speech might be a federal crime, and he still refused to back down. Today, he is the plaintiff in a federal lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security. The man they tried to silence is now the reason millions of Americans know what they are doing. That is what happens when one person refuses to be afraid. Courage has a way of spreading faster than fear once someone is willing to go first.
That is our responsibility now. Not to answer intimidation with violence or hatred, but with more voices. More truth. More people willing to stand up peacefully and say, “This is not who we are.” Because they can intimidate one person. They can intimidate a hundred. But they cannot intimidate an entire country that refuses to surrender its voice. And every single day, more people are finding the courage to speak. That is why I still have hope for America. And you should, too.
I’ll see you tomorrow,
Heather
[Heather Delaney Reese]
