DHS Tracked Down a Man Over an Email to ICE’s Director
Federal agents from the Department of Homeland Security tracked down a New York man five months after he sent a strongly worded email to the acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, raising serious questions about government surveillance and the treatment of Americans who criticize federal agencies, as reported by NPR.
David Streever, 45, a former journalist now working in tech, sent the email on January 26, 2026, to Todd Lyons, then-acting director of ICE, after federal immigration officers fatally shot two people — Renée Macklin Good and Alex Pretti — in Minneapolis. In the message, Streever compared Lyons to Nazi official Reinhard Heydrich and warned that his conscience would torment him.
How Federal Agents Found Him
On June 23, while Streever was on vacation in Finland with his 7-year-old daughter, two Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) agents visited his home in Rochester, N.Y. They spoke to his wife, the Rev. Hilary Streever, an Episcopal priest, and left a “WARNING NOTICE” form stating he “MAY BE IN VIOLATION OF FEDERAL LAW.”
When Streever returned to the U.S. on June 25, landing at John F. Kennedy International Airport, an HSI agent tracked him to his airport hotel near JFK. The agent, Trevor Pitts, left a business card with the front desk and had already left voicemails for Streever at the hotel before he even knew Streever was there. It remains unclear how HSI located him — Streever had not told anyone which hotel he was staying at.
“One powerless citizen yelled into the void with a stern email to the former director of this agency six months ago,” Streever told NPR. “And now there’s agents at his door.”
A Pattern of Intimidation
The same pair of agents had earlier that day visited Paigelynne Gonyea, a poll worker in Syracuse, N.Y., confronting her at a polling place during New York’s primary election over an Instagram post she made about an ICE officer, as NPR previously reported. Both Streever and Gonyea were presented with the same standardized warning form from ICE’s Office of Professional Responsibility.
Civil liberties advocates say these cases represent an escalating pattern of government intimidation against critics of ICE and DHS. The ACLU has already filed a class action lawsuit alleging DHS illegally tracks and intimidates people who observe and record federal immigration enforcement operations, as NPR reported.
“It’s starting to look like a pattern of knocking on people’s doors to ask them questions about clearly constitutionally protected speech. And that is very troubling,” said Nathan Freed Wessler, deputy director of the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy and Technology Project.
Legal Experts Say the Email Was Protected Speech
Adam Steinbaugh, an attorney at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), told NPR that Streever’s email does not constitute a threat under federal law. “A threat is a serious expression of an intent to commit unlawful violence. That’s not what this was at all,” Steinbaugh said. “The government doesn’t have to listen to those [concerns], but it doesn’t get to dispatch federal agents to your door and stalk you across the state of New York.”
DHS declined to answer specific questions about the case, issuing a generic statement: “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.”
Broader Surveillance Concerns
This case is the latest in a series of actions by DHS against individuals who criticize ICE. The agency has built a massive surveillance web, buying commercial data about Americans in bulk without warrants, as NPR has documented. ICE has also sent administrative subpoenas to email and social media platforms to identify people who have posted about the agency anonymously.
Jeramie Scott, senior counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), questioned whether surveillance technologies were abused in Streever’s case. “Is there abuse of surveillance technologies in this instance? I think that’s a legitimate question, given that there’s no other information here that suggests that this person is any kind of threat and warrants the attention of federal law enforcement officers,” Scott said.
What’s Next
Streever has decided to speak publicly about his experience rather than be intimidated. He connected with civil liberties advocates and his congressional representative, and says the government’s response has paradoxically empowered him.
“If they hadn’t come after me, I would have just been a guy whose sole act of defiance was writing a stern email to a faceless bureaucrat who was never going to read it,” Streever said. “But for them to come after me six months later for that one email, it makes me feel like we do have a lot of power. It makes me feel like they do care that we’re speaking up.”
The case is likely to fuel ongoing legal challenges to DHS’s tactics, building on the existing ACLU class action and raising fundamental questions about the boundaries of protected speech and government surveillance in the United States.