'Outrageous': Trump Officials Investigated Left-Wing Groups After Alex Pretti Killing in Minneapolis

"These are the actions of an authoritarian state," said US Sen. Chris Van Hollen on Thursday regarding new reports of a broad investigation by the Department of Homeland Security into numerous left-wing groups in Minnesota earlier this year, in the wake of Border Patrol agents' fatal shooting of Alex Pretti at a protest against the agency's anti-immigration crackdown.

As The New York Times reported, days after Pretti was killed in the street as he tried to help a woman who had been violently pushed by the agents, the DHS office in St. Paul opened an investigation into groups including the climate-focused Sunrise Movement, major labor groups like the AFL-CIO and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the Democratic Socialists of America, and a collective called Direct Action Minnesota (DAMN).

The Trump administration began the probe under the auspices of investigating whether the groups had provided "help and money," as the Times reported, to people who had participated in protests across the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, where tens of thousands of residents rallied against US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and defended their neighbors from immigration raids last winter.

Newly released government documents, which were uncovered after an attorney filed a motion with the federal District Court in Minnesota demanding information about the DHS investigation, show that the agency characterized the protesters who opposed ICE as "violent opportunists and agitators."

The investigation included DHS' use of administrative subpoenas to obtain financial records from Sunrise Movement, Communications Workers of America, and the SEIU, scrutinizing what the agency called "domestic terrorist financing."

Undercover agents also infiltrated Signal chats and meetings at libraries and churches, recording attendees' comments criticizing ICE and calling for the agency to be abolished—a view held by roughly 50% of Americans, according to a recent poll by YouGov—as well as their names and license plate numbers. They also scoured the individuals' social media accounts for images and information.

“None of these individuals did anything other than engage in protected First Amendment speech in a church meeting room,” wrote Kevin Riach, the lawyer who filed the motion. “Yet now their personal information is memorialized in a DHS dossier.”

The investigation "concluded, with no evidence (but obvious political animus), that numerous Twin Cities unions and nonprofit organizations were involved in a widespread conspiracy," said Riach. “It surveilled and surreptitiously gathered financial records generated by these organizations despite the lack of any connection between those organizations and criminal conduct.”

As the Times reported, the indictment in June of 15 organizers who led direct actions against federal agents, announced by US Attorney Daniel Rosen, came out of the sprawling DHS investigation.

When Rosen announced the indictments, he cited National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7), a memo issued last September and mandated a "national strategy to investigate and disrupt networks, entities, and organizations that foment political violence so that law enforcement can intervene in criminal conspiracies before they result in violent political acts"—with an exclusive focus on left-wing groups.

Before the indictment, the Times reported, investigators showed a PowerPoint slide to grand jurors linking 18 groups including the AFL-CIO, Vets for Peace, and a local teachers union to a "conspiracy" against ICE agents.

The news of the indictment, said Paul Blest of the labor rights media organization More Perfect Union, "should be the biggest story in America."

"Just so everyone clearly understands, the Trump administration's approach to dissent is to exhaust every avenue to put dissenters in federal prison," said Blest.

The First Amendment advocacy group Defending Rights and Dissent called the investigation a "disturbing, invasive, and utterly unjustifiable attack on freedom of expression and political dissent."

"The inquiry comes amid President Trump’s escalating crackdown on freedom of speech across the United States," Defending Rights and Dissent added. "Last year, Trump issued NSPM-7, a directive which tramples the First Amendment in weaponizing the federal government to root out his political adversaries and cast all activism against the administration as 'domestic extremism.'"

"Defending Rights and Dissent calls for this investigation to be dropped immediately," said the group, "and strongly condemns all attempts by the Trump administration to intimidate ordinary Americans exercising their freedom of speech."