ICE Tracks You to Your Hotel for Criticizing It

An American man sends an angry email to the head of ICE, and five months later federal agents find his hotel room.

"Like any American, [ICE's response] rattled David. He's now anxious about whether or not he can even criticize ICE or DHS without getting a knock on his door."

— JT Morris, deputy director of litigation at FIRE

David Streever is a Rochester, New York man with no criminal record and no immigration violations. He is an American citizen. In January 2026, outraged by the shooting deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, he did something any citizen has a constitutional right to do: he wrote an angry email to the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

The email was harsh. Streever called then-acting ICE Director Todd Lyons a "monstrous human being" who would "go down in history as America's Reinhard Heydrich, the butcher." He predicted Lyons would "never know peace" and would "torment [himself] until your last day on Earth."

It was ugly rhetoric. It was also protected speech, as the Supreme Court has repeatedly held. Writing angry letters to government officials is an American tradition dating back to the Founders themselves, who signed the Declaration of Independence with the full expectation of being hanged for treason if the British caught them.

Translation: telling a federal official he will carry a guilty conscience to his grave is not a threat. It is an opinion. And opinions are what the First Amendment is for.

Five months after the email, ICE agents showed up at Streever's home in Rochester. Nest doorbell camera footage provided by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression shows two federal officers walking past children's toys on his front porch, repeatedly ringing the doorbell on a sunny Tuesday afternoon in late June.

Nobody was home yet. Streever and his 7-year-old daughter were in Finland. His wife, an Episcopal priest, arrived to find the agents still waiting. One of them handed her a "WARNING NOTICE" printed on official federal stationery from ICE and DHS, stating in underlined capital letters that Streever "YOU MAY BE IN VIOLATION OF FEDERAL LAW."

The notice demanded that he "promptly... discontinue" his "behavior" and warned that the warning would be "taken into consideration" if he "continue[s] to be involved" in "criminal activities." His wife told the agents he was out of the country and would return that Friday.

They did not wait.

While Streever and his daughter slept off jet lag at a hotel in New York City before the last leg of the trip home, a federal agent showed up at the front desk looking for him. He left a business card for the clerk to give to Streever. Also that night, two agents repeatedly called Streever's phone, leaving anonymous voicemails identifying themselves only as "Homeland Security Investigations."

His wife had not told authorities where he was staying. The government found him anyway.

On the train ride home, Streever told his daughter that federal agents might confront them. She broke down in tears.

FIRE filed a federal lawsuit on July 6 in Washington, D.C., naming DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin as a defendant. The suit asks the court to order DHS and ICE to stop retaliating against Streever for his protected speech.

JT Morris, FIRE's deputy director of litigation, told Daily Kos the case is about "ICE trying to intimidate an American into silence." FIRE Senior Attorney Adam Steinbaugh noted the five-month gap between the email and the visit: "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."

The Streever case is not isolated. In a similar incident, Paigelynn Gonyea was served an ICE warning letter after she posted a video to social media naming Jonathan Ross as the ICE agent who shot Renee Good. Agents then showed up at a polling station in Syracuse, New York, where Gonyea was working, to deliver the notice in person.

For those who criticized ICE from anonymous accounts, the Trump administration has been issuing subpoenas. Reddit was ordered to appear before a grand jury in Washington, D.C., as ICE demanded the company release the personal data of its users.

The pattern is unmistakable: criticize the agency, and the agency comes to your door.

The broader context makes the Streever case even more alarming. Under NSPM-7, Trump's counterterrorism memorandum, the administration has been systematically criminalizing dissent from the left. The Prairieland case in Texas stands as the starkest example: Daniel "Des" Sanchez Estrada was sentenced to 30 years in federal prison for transporting a box of anarchist zines he did not even write. He was one of eight defendants sentenced to a combined 450 years for protesting at an ICE detention facility.

The prosecution argued that Sanchez moved the zines to conceal evidence against his wife, who attended a protest where a police officer was shot. The underlying assumption: possessing political pamphlets is equivalent to joining a terrorist cell. Under this logic, reading The Intercept could constitute evidence of radicalization, and clearing your browser history after hearing about Don Lemon's arrest could be obstruction.

Seth Stern of Freedom of the Press Foundation put it bluntly: "We've reached the point in the erosion of the First Amendment where the government considers possession of anarchist zines and membership in a terrorist cell to be more or less the same thing."

Meanwhile, local fusion centers across the country are echoing the administration's rhetoric with intelligence bulletins that read more like right-wing op-eds. The Southeast Florida Fusion Center's 28-page bulletin cited Pizzagate theorist Jack Posobiec and described inflatable animal costumes as antifa propaganda. The Dallas Regional Fusion Center urged police to "monitor social media pages for extremist groups using ghost accounts." An FBI bulletin cited a single social media post as evidence that Minneapolis was primed for violence against federal agents.

Brendan McQuade, a University of Southern Maine professor who studies fusion centers, said the documents are "not an intelligence bulletin about an organization. This is a target package that, to me, is encouraging police to go hunting for a very broad profile of not even just dissent but sometimes aesthetic markers of dissenting behavior."

The ACLU's Sara Robinson called it what it is: "The Trump administration is continuing to treat dissent as a threat."

Streever's own words about why he's fighting may be the most important part of the whole case: "I cherish our right to speak openly about issues of public concern. I hope others will not be discouraged from peacefully expressing their views, even when those views are critical of the government."

The question is not whether his email was polite. The question is whether the federal government can send agents to your house and track you to your hotel because you complained about what it did. If the answer is yes, then the First Amendment is already dead. It just hasn't stopped moving yet.