ICE Rebuts Nazi Allegations By Going Full Gestapo To Hunt Down Critics

from the we’ll-make-their-point-for-them! dept

Oh boy do the Nazi-esque dudes running rampant in our country hate being called Nazis. They love the Nazi chic and the Nazi talk about securing the nation for white, blue-eyed males, but they hate being compared to the thing(s) they resemble most, even when they’re promoting people for actively generating these comparisons.

Like any bully, Trump officials and foot soldiers have the thinnest of skin. Trump’s (literal!) [but also figuratively!] skin is so thin he should probably be submerged in liquid until actually needed to rally the troops… or nap through a meeting.

An abusive administration that clearly wants to split the difference between autocracy and fascism somehow finds itself so pervious (is that a word aka the opposite of “impervious”?) to random criticism from random Americans, it can’t help but blow federal money and resources on silencing the few one-offs who have managed to rile low-level managers.

Beset by Nazi accusations, the administration (as expressed by its foot soldiers) decided the best response was to… behave like Nazis. (h/t Adam Steinbaugh)

After two federal law enforcement agents tracked down a Syracuse woman last Tuesday to warn her about a social media post, they went to Rochester to find David Streever.

A picture showed up on his phone from the door camera. Two people stood among the childrens’ toys on his porch. A woman, wearing an ordinary windbreaker and slip-on sneakers, held a bunch of papers.

Streever was not there. He was with his seven-year-old daughter at Moominworld in Finland – an amusement park in the happiest country in the world.

The two federal agents told Streever’s wife they had come Tuesday afternoon to deliver a warning letter about an email Streever had sent in January to Todd Lyons, then the acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

That is insanely disturbing, even if you blow past the the first sentence, which makes it clear this isn’t the first time federal agents have hunted down people who have done nothing more than engage in absolutely protected speech.

David Streever sent then-ICE Director Todd Lyons an angry email shortly after federal officers murdered Minneapolis resident Alex Pretti — the second ICE protester the government had killed in during its politically motivated “surge” targeting the state. Here’s what it said, according to its author:

“You are a monstrous human being and will go down in history as America’s Reinhard Heydrich, the butcher.

“The way you are protecting the obvious execution in Minnesota, even as we see the videos, will lead to your downfall. Even Trump will turn on you before the end, and you will be a sad, despised man who eats himself alive with shame at your own pathetic weakness.

“You will never know peace. You will seek to lose yourself, to escape the burden of knowing the truth about yourself. But wherever you go, you will find yourself. You will torment yourself until your last day on Earth.”

Todd Lyons left before Trump could turn on him, but signing his name to a memo that told ICE officers to ignore the law and the Constitution when performing arrests or entering houses made it clear he’d eventually be forced out, even if everything he did was exactly what Trump wanted him to do.

But that’s not the end of harassment experienced by Streever as the result of his completely innocuous email. Not only did federal officers visit his house, but they tried to accost him upon his return to the US, somehow managing to locate him in the hotel room where he was (briefly) staying with his daughter.

On Thursday, Streever and daughter Helen flew back to New York’s JFK Airport, sailed through the customs checkpoint and took a shuttle to a hotel, where they immediately crashed with jet lag.

At 9:55 p.m., the front desk rang his hotel room. A special agent named Trevor Pitts had come looking for him, the staff said. The hotel staff did not tell the agent that Streever and his daughter were upstairs, Streever said. The agent left his card.

Streever’s wife also received this completely bogus “Warning Notice” from (allegedly) ICE’s Office of Professional Responsibility. (via Adam Steinbaugh)

Note the handwritten “David Streever” on a form that looks like someone just whipped it up at the last minute before heading out to get their government thug on. Note also that no other information was filled in by the “special agent” delivering the threat to prosecute Streever for “[violating] Title 18 of the US Code” with his email to Todd Lyons.

Further down in the completely bogus “WARNING NOTICE,” the people who wrote it claim Streever’s letter was a potentially prosecutable threat against a federal official. It also refers to Title 19 as justifying the OPR’s involvement in this, which Title 19 definitely does not authorize. Title 19 refers only to “Telecommunications Trade” in terms of actual trade (tariffs, trade agreements, taxes, etc.). It doesn’t have anything to say about authorizing investigations of communications ICE might want to pretend are threatening.

On top of that, the OPR has nothing whatsoever to do with external investigations and prosecutions. Its own web page makes that very clear:

The ICE Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) upholds the agency’s professional standards through a multi-disciplinary approach of security, inspections and investigations to promote organizational health, integrity, and accountability across the agency. OPR promotes organizational integrity by vigilantly managing ICE’s security programs, conducting independent reviews of ICE programs and operations, and impartially investigating allegations of employee and contractor misconduct.

To promote integrity, mitigate risk and uphold the agency’s professional standards, the OPR-led Integrity Coordination Center receives and assesses information it receives and refers any allegations of employee misconduct to appropriate offices for investigation, if necessary. This process ensures that allegations of criminal or administrative misconduct against ICE personnel are properly assessed and thoroughly investigated.

In other words, this faux-form letter/threat is exactly the sort of thing that should be referred to the OPR office for investigation. Given its purview, there’s no way in hell this letter was actually written by someone in ICE’s OPR. That’s why it’s missing a signature or any other identifying information. Because if someone inside the OPR did decide to write this bogus letter on behalf of DHS personnel looking to get their Gestapo on, they’d be aiding and abetting the stuff the OPR is there to deter.

And that would all be awful enough if it was a one-off. But it isn’t. This was reported by the same news source only four days earlier.

Two U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents issued a warning to a Syracuse woman Tuesday to remove a social media account they said threatens federal agents.

PaigeLynne Gonyea said she believes they are referring to a January post where she named the ICE agent who shot protester Renee Good.

[…]

The agents handed Gonyea a form letter that says they were investigating threats made against ICE personnel. The form says the agents had identified an Instagram account they believe breaks federal law. They asked her to remove and discontinue the behavior, according to the unsigned document she shared on Instagram.

Odds are it’s the same bullshit legal threat David Streever’s wife received. Other details in the reporting suggests it contained the same boilerplate about illegal “threats” against “government officials.” More likely than not, this form was unsigned by those delivering it and also missing the signature of the “special agent” from ICE’s Office of Professional Responsibility. It looks like nothing more than it is: government agents with guns and official paperwork intimidating US citizens for daring to criticize federal officials (in the case of Streever) or simply reposting facts that were already in the public domain (Gonyea’s case).

This reporting also includes disturbing photos of federal officers looming over the election worker as they tried to get her to recant. And we’ll see what happens here, now that one of the New Gestapo has been identified by journalists:

David Brody, one of the two agents, said he could not answer questions from a reporter.

This administration is so stupidly evil that its immediate response to being called Nazis is to literally act like Nazis. Its only defense might be that this pair of vindictive responses seems a bit more KGB than Gestapo, given the reliance on internal tech, rather than a network of informants (that’s Charlie Kirk cancel culture, yo). Either way, it’s fucking horrifying.

Filed Under: alex pretti, armed thugs, dhs, ice, mass deportation, minneapolis, nazis, renee good, trump administration