A lawsuit has been filed against DHS (Department of Homeland Security) after agents from the department tracked and visited a man who had sent a strongly-worded email to ICE.
In June, David Streever, a Rochester, N.Y. resident, had federal agents show up at his front door and leave a warning notice that he may have broken the law when he wrote the email to the former head of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
A nonprofit called Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression on Monday filed a lawsuit in federal court arguing that Streever’s email was protected speech and that the agents’ and their bosses violated his First Amendment rights.
FIRE is arguing that the First Amendment protects the right to speak unfavorably about the police, but the “Department of Homeland Security is actively threatening that freedom, tracking down and retaliating against sspeakers like Plaintiff David Streever because he exercised his fundamental right to criticize one of the highest-ranking law enforcement officers in the United States.”
The lawsuit also states that the Constitution does not allow such an abuse of authority.
Last week, NPR reported that HSI agents attempted to contact Streever at his house and then at a hotel over an email he sent to Todd Lyons who resigned his role as acting ICE director in late May. HSI agents are federal criminal investigators for the DHS.
Streever sent Lyons an email in January after DHS agents fatally shot two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis, Renee Good and Alex Petti. The email compared Lyons to a Nazi and said that Lyons’ own conscience would persecute him. The subject line of the email was, “What’s next.”
In June, five months after the email was sent and after Lyons had left his role, the HSI agents showed up at Streever’s home and left a document for his wife to sign. The notice said that ICE’s Office of Professional Responsibility determined that the email may have violated federal law and that Streever should “promptly remove and/or discontinue the aforementioned behavior.”
Streever, who was on a vacation at t theme park with his daughter, was then told by front desk personnel at his hotel that DHS agents had come there looking for him. His wife has said that she did not tell the agents at which hotel he and their daughter were lodging.
DHS issued a response claiming that allegations that the agency is trying to restrict free speech is untrue.
“Our law enforcement officers are on the frontlines arresting terrorists, gang members, murderers, child sex abusers, and rapists. They are experiencing coordinated campaigns of violence against them and facing a 1,300% increase in assaults against them, a 3,300% increase in vehicular attacks, and an 8,000% increase in death threats,” the statement read.
There was no evidence of those figures at the time of this reporting, nor is it clear how that directly relates to Streever’s case.
One of the attorneys for FIRE pushed back saying that the fact that DHS officials did not address Streever’s email until five months later is indicative that their client posed no threat.
