David Streever appears to have been the second person in a matter of hours, after poll worker PaigeLynne Gonyea, that a specific pair of federal law enforcement officers tried to visit this past Tuesday in response to speech about Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials. They reportedly came up empty in Streever’s case because he was abroad at the time, but then found him two days later at a hotel in New York City.
The mystery is how they found him.
In September of last year, President Trump issued an executive order targeting so-called “Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence.” But the order appears to lump in widely shared beliefs, including opposition to capitalism, among others. It also construes opposition to ICE in the name of anti-fascism as a tactic “used by domestic terrorists to wage a violent assault” on America and its institutions.
With that in mind, here’s what we know about federal officers tracking down Streever:
Streever says he sent a harshly critical letter to acting ICE director Todd Lyons in January. It’s denunciatory in its tone and predicts the downfall of Lyons’s career, along with a lifetime of guilt, but contains no threats.
Streever was apparently in Finland when officers showed up at his doorstep on Tuesday (at least three months after he sent the email) and told his wife they were there to issue a warning about the email to Lyons. One of the agents, Abbi Henry, reportedly left a business card. Surveillance photos Streever provided to Syracuse.com strongly suggest this was the same pair of agents who had visited PaigeLynne Gonyea that same day.
Streever says he returned to the U.S. from Finland two days later, passing through a Customs checkpoint at JFK airport. He says he and his daughter didn’t go home to Rochester, New York, but instead went to a hotel in New York City and went to sleep.
Apparently, Trevor Pitts, a member of an unnamed agency showed up at the hotel just before 9:55 p.m. and asked to speak to Streever. The staff member at the front desk didn’t confirm Streever was there, and Pitts left his business card. Then the hotel worker called Streever to tell him an agent was asking for him.
What happened within federal law enforcement between Customs and the hotel remains opaque. Henry and Pitts, who left their business cards, reportedly wouldn’t answer questions from Syracuse.com, nor did Homeland Security spokesperson Lauren Bis.
Streever told Syracuse.com that he intends to ask his credit card company to investigate how he was found. Financial surveillance by law enforcement is far from unheard of, but it wouldn’t be normal to see agents use it in this way. For instance, ICE in particular once had widespread access to something called the Transaction Record Analysis Center (TRAC), used to surveil immigrants who wired money, but much of that access was clawed back last year amid public scrutiny and accusations of illegality.
A February lawsuit proposed as a class action alleges that the gathering of data about ICE observers was used as intimidation, and is an illegal breach of the plaintiffs’ First Amendment rights. “I really need to know—who has my data and what are they using it for?” lead plaintiff Elinor Hilton told Time in April, adding, “That changes my life.”
Gizmodo asked the Department of Homeland Security, ICE, and Customs and Border Patrol (CPB) for details about how agents found Streever in his hotel. We will update this article if we receive a useful reply.
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