A conservative-leaning group of nonprofits on Wednesday intervened in the Trump administration’s ongoing prosecution of a network of 15 activists who opposed the unprecedented Operation Metro Surge series of immigration raids across Minnesota which began late last year. The legal petitioners are led by the Philadelphia-based Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), with support provided by the libertarian Cato Institute and The Society for the Rule of Law, which was founded by former Republican officials.
The trio of nonprofits described their amicus brief in defense of a loose network spanning major labor unions and grassroots anarchist and left-wing political movements as “out of concern over the weaponization of federal law enforcement authority to target perceived political opposition to the current presidential administration’s policies.”
Several members of the activist network have helped predict immigration raids by actively monitoring the movements of ICE officers, a practice often referred to as “commuting.” Prosecutors allege that such behavior was a criminal conspiracy to disrupt U.S. federal immigration officers through a coalition known as Direct Action Minnesota (DAMN).
The FIRE coalition’s brief further notes that much of the evidence against the activist network was gathered by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) under the authority of President Trump’s National Security Presidential Memorandum-7 (NSPM-7), which the petitioners describe as treating “left-wing political viewpoints as indicia of terrorism.” The administration “weaponized NSPM-7 to surveil core First Amendment activity—infiltrating meetings, monitoring encrypted chats, and secretly seizing years of financial records from unions and nonprofits,” continued the brief.
The massive surveillance program, conducted by the Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) branch of ICE through Operations Puppet Master and Whipple Shield, targeted labor union and nonprofit financial records through subpoenas while simultaneously sending tens of undercover agents into activist events to photograph license plates and worm their way into encrypted group chats, typically on the Signal platform. (Targets for subpoenas included PayPal/Venmo, Stripe, the Federal Reserve’s FedWire system, Clearing House Payments Company LLC, and the cloud computing platform Fly.io.)
Public court filings from the prosecution include references to HSI undercover agents with identifiers including 137, 142, 5022, 9087, 9759, 9766, 9833/9883, and 9843. HSI Special Operations Group (SOG) Special Agent Jason Prasnikar and his partner Marco Salterelli were further revealed in Document 212 to have used hard hats and safety vests as cover for collecting license plates of activists near St. John’s Church in St. Paul Minnesota on the evening of April 14.
Internal HSI documents further reveal that on February 22, 20 HSI SOG agents were “tasked with surveilling a de-arrest tactics training at Loring Park, Minneapolis Minnesota,” though the event was said to have been cancelled due to weather. Seven HSI undercover agents were also reported to have monitored an event near 24th St. in Minneapolis on January 14.
(The names of at least 18 other SOG special agents are included in public filings for the same case, working under acting group supervisor Josh Schottenfeld. The documents further name at least 40 further HSI special agents, as well as Technical Enforcement Officer Christopher Leonard’s support for street camera surveillance of the activist network.)
A document filed by the defense two weeks ago further demonstrated how an HSI officer named Guy Gino on January 26 leveraged the facial recognition platform of the Manhattan-based company Clearview AI to dredge up purported past political activity of the first named defendant, Isaac Sant. Public contracting records show that Clearview has received $3,750,000 in payments as part of a two-year contract with HSI which ends next week.
The first of many search results purports to have identified Sant in a photo published by the D.C.-based nonprofit Defending Rights & Dissent in July 2018, following the U.S. Justice Department dismissing charges against 38 protestors of Trump’s first inauguration. Another search result purported to identify Sant as appearing 15 minutes into a documentary on the April 2015 wave of protests in Baltimore after the killing of the 25-year-old African-American Freddie Gray.
Clearview AI’s software is simultaneously being licensed to the parent organization of U.S. Army Special Forces as part of “high-value targeting” of foreign targets through platforms such as social media.
And, as first revealed by this publication, HSI last year temporarily reactivated its license of the Graphite platform from the Israeli spyware firm Paragon Solutions, following Paragon’s acquisition by American capital and development of a close relationship with both the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC).
The connection between U.S. counter-terrorism programs and NSPM-7 investigations into domestic left-wing political movements has been most explicit in the realm of financial investigations. The U.S. treasury secretary and former hedge fund manager Scott Bessent stated at U.S. State Department summit in July that, “Through our Office of Foreign Assets Control, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, and [IRS Criminal Investigation], we have spent decades developing the world’s most sophisticated financial counterterrorism capabilities.”
“And now we are mobilizing some of the same tools that we have deployed against terrorists abroad to confront this emerging threat here at home,” added Bessent.
I wouldn't want to be an identical twin to one of these suspects....