ICE Is Running One of the Largest Anti-Left Surveillance Operations in US History

Attorneys for 15 Minnesota residents facing federal conspiracy charges person obtained grounds of a sweeping, perchance unconstitutional spying cognition carried retired by Immigration and Customs Enforcement against left-wing societal movements successful Minnesota and beyond.

The high-profile Minnesota 15 prosecution makes wide that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), flush with national funds and recently hired personnel, is present President Donald Trump’s superior instrumentality against dissent, with a almighty array of post-9/11 investigative authorities brought to carnivore against mundane Americans organizing their communities.

Nothing of this standard has been seen successful the United States, experts say, since the national government’s counterinsurgency against the New Left and the anti-war question successful the 1960s and 1970s.

Among the records revealed during the find process successful these cases are dozens of reports, audio transcripts, emails, intercepted Signal chats, photographs, database queries, and more. They uncover the interior workings of the home coercion investigations, moving nether the names Project Whipple Shield and Operation Puppet Master, authorized by the arguable National Security Presidential Memorandum 7.

Published pursuing Charlie Kirk’s assassination successful September of past year, NSPM 7 instructs national instrumentality enforcement to usage each instrumentality disposable against organizations and radical who knock the administration's policies and espouse "anti-Christian" ideas. The afloat scope and grade of the investigations it authorizes remains unknown.

Defense attorneys for the Minnesota 15 assertion that the prosecution stems from a broader nationwide surveillance cognition aimed astatine opponents of the Trump administration’s migration policies. One lawyer successful the lawsuit straight compares the DHS-run run to the FBI’s infamous Counterintelligence Program, oregon COINTELPRO, which unconstitutionally surveilled, infiltrated, and blackmailed radical justice, civilian rights, and anti-war movements from the 1950s done the aboriginal 1970s.

Three erstwhile instrumentality enforcement officials who reviewed filings concur, telling WIRED that the lawsuit is astir surely portion of a wider intelligence-gathering cognition that began agelong earlier the medication invaded Minnesota successful December 2025.

Dueling motions successful the lawsuit implicit find of DHS’s surveillance programme uncover that unit with Homeland Security Investigations—one of ICE’s 2 components—repurposed backing mechanisms and investigative tools for superior transgression probes and turned them connected home dissenters. Operation Keyhole, the HSI undercover programme that bankrolled the Minnesota 15 prosecution, dates backmost to 2008. As of June 2026, it was underwriting a fractional twelve progressive undercover investigations successful the Minneapolis–Saint Paul area.

More than 120 HSI agents, galore drawn from specialized units crossed the state that person served arsenic the starring borderline of the administration’s militarized migration enforcement operations, were assigned to the case—including 11 undercovers. They utilized highly invasive surveillance techniques, including the deployment of Reaper drones and Patriot Act tools usually restricted to wealth laundering and coercion investigations. Undercover operatives besides infiltrated churches successful evident usurpation of a tribunal order.