DHS Agents Track Down ICE Critic Over Harsh Email, Raising Free Speech Fears
David Streever, a 45-year-old former journalist and tech worker from Rochester, New York, was vacationing in Finland with his 7-year-old daughter last week when his doorbell camera captured two law enforcement officers in blue jackets waiting on his front porch. The agents, from Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), were looking for him about an email he had sent five months earlier to Todd Lyons, then-acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The incident, first reported by NPR, has sparked alarm among civil liberties advocates who say it represents a dangerous escalation in the government’s efforts to intimidate critics of its immigration enforcement policies.
The Email That Triggered an Investigation
On January 26, 2026, Streever sent a strongly worded email to Lyons’ government address after federal immigration officers fatally shot two people in Minneapolis — Renee Macklin Good on January 7 and Alex Pretti on January 24. In the email, reviewed by NPR, Streever compared Lyons to Reinhard Heydrich, a Nazi official and architect of the Holocaust, and predicted his eventual downfall. “You will never know peace,” the email read. “You will seek to lose yourself, to escape the burden of knowing the truth about yourself.”
Streever told NPR he never intended to threaten anyone. “I’ve never made a threat against anyone. I’m not a violent person,” he said. The email contains no explicit threat of violence, and legal experts across multiple civil liberties organizations agree it is constitutionally protected speech under the First Amendment.
A Coordinated Effort
On June 23, 2026, two HSI agents visited Streever’s home in Rochester while he was in Finland. His wife, the Rev. Hilary Streever, an Episcopal priest, encountered the agents and was told they were investigating “an email he may or may not have sent threatening Todd Lyons.” The agents left a form titled “WARNING NOTICE” stating that Streever “MAY BE IN VIOLATION OF FEDERAL LAW” and referencing statutes against threatening federal officials.
The same pair of agents had confronted Paigelynne Gonyea, a Syracuse poll worker, earlier that same day over an Instagram post about the ICE officer who shot Renee Good. She was presented with an identical warning form. Civil liberties groups say these are the first cases they are aware of in which agents used such forms.
Tracked to His Hotel
After returning from Finland, Streever landed at John F. Kennedy International Airport on the evening of June 25 and checked into a nearby airport hotel. Around 9 p.m., he was woken by a call from the front desk: an HSI agent named Trevor Pitts had tracked him to the hotel and left a business card. Streever had not told anyone — not even his wife — which hotel he was staying at.
“I was really freaked out,” Streever told NPR. “How could this agent have found me?”
The question of how HSI located Streever remains unanswered. The agency has access to commercial data brokers, surveillance cameras, cell phone location data, and credit card transactions — tools that NPR has documented in its investigation of ICE’s surveillance apparatus.
A Pattern of Intimidation
Civil liberties advocates say the Streever case is part of a broader pattern. The ACLU filed a lawsuit in February 2026 alleging DHS illegally tracked and intimidated a Philadelphia man who sent a critical email about an Afghan deportation. In another case, DHS sent hundreds of administrative subpoenas to tech companies to unmask anonymous anti-ICE users.
“It’s starting to look like a pattern of knocking on people’s doors to ask them questions about clearly constitutionally protected speech,” said Nathan Freed Wessler, deputy director of the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy and Technology Project. “And that is very troubling.”
Adam Steinbaugh, an attorney at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), called the investigation “clearly out of line.” He added: “The government doesn’t have to listen to those, but it doesn’t get to dispatch federal agents to your door and stalk you across the state of New York.”
Jeramie Scott, senior counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), questioned whether the use of surveillance technologies in this instance constituted an abuse of power. “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,” he said.
DHS Response
DHS declined to comment on the specifics of Streever’s case, issuing a statement that said: “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.”
A Citizen Empowered
Despite the intimidation, Streever said the experience has had an unexpected effect. Rather than silencing him, the government’s response has made him feel that his voice matters more than he realized.
“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.”
What to Watch For
The Streever and Gonyea cases raise several outstanding questions. Will there be legal challenges to the new warning notice forms? How many other individuals have received similar visits from federal agents? And will Congress investigate DHS’s actions against government critics?
Perry Grossman of the New York Civil Liberties Union warned that the stakes extend beyond individual cases. “If this is the kind of speech that the administration, that DHS wants to go after, then they are trying to fundamentally redefine the First Amendment and the scope of permissible public debate,” he said. “And that is wrong. That is ridiculous.”