David Streever sued the Department of Homeland Security in federal court in Washington, D.C., saying Homeland Security Investigations agents tracked him and left a warning over an email he sent to the former head of ICE.
The lawsuit, filed by the nonprofit Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, says Streever's January email was protected speech and accuses DHS of tracking down and retaliating against him, adding, "Our Constitution does not tolerate such a brazen abuse of authority."
Streever wrote to Todd Lyons on Jan. 26 after federal immigration officers in Minneapolis fatally shot two U.S. citizen observers during the immigration enforcement surge there; the three-paragraph note compared Lyons to a Nazi, predicted he would be tormented by his own conscience and carried the subject line "What's next."
On June 23 two HSI agents rang the Streever family's doorbell and left a document labeled "WARNING NOTICE" and "YOU MAY BE IN VIOLATION OF FEDERAL LAW," which described federal statutes making it a crime to threaten federal officials and said ICE's Office of Professional Responsibility had identified an email that may violate federal law and was requesting that he promptly remove or discontinue the behavior.
Streever was taking his 7-year-old daughter on a vacation to a Finnish theme park when the agents visited; he and his daughter landed at John F. Kennedy International Airport two days later and stayed at a nearby airport hotel, where the front desk told him a Department of Homeland Security agent had left a business card despite his wife not having told agents the hotel's location.
The suit names three federal agents as defendants along with Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin and ICE officials, and it alleges the agents' actions caused Streever to self-censor and violated a First Amendment bar on the government threatening people over protected speech.
The complaint asks the court to find Streever's email was protected by the First Amendment, to bar defendants "from taking any further actions, formal or informal, to coerce, threaten, retaliate against, or intimate repercussions directly or indirectly to Plaintiff Streever for his protected speech and petitioning activity," and to declare the warning notices issued by federal agents are "sufficient" to chill free expression, the suit reads.
The lawsuit says DHS and ICE did not immediately respond to requests for comment; DHS provided a statement last week that read, "ICE investigates all credible threats towards its employees and officers, including threats to the ICE Director. As a matter of policy, we do not comment on any ongoing investigations." Adam Steinbaugh, senior attorney at FIRE, said, "If someone is really threatening a government official, you don't wait five months to act on it."
The complaint also recounts that the same day HSI agents visited Streever's home they confronted Paigelynne Gonyea, who was working at a polling place in Syracuse, about an Instagram post, left her a voicemail and then delivered a warning notice inside the library; agents told her the post they were investigating concerned Jonathan Ross, an ICE officer who fatally shot Renee Macklin Good in Minneapolis. DHS later released a statement saying Gonyea "committed a federal crime by posting the address of an ICE law enforcement officer online" and shared with the Associated Press a redacted screenshot of a different Instagram post that reads in part, "The killer's name is Jonathan Ross of"; Gonyea said, "Based on everything I know, I do not believe that I made that post, and I have no independent recollection of ever creating or publishing it," and added she was concerned about the "broader constitutional issues" raised by her experience.