A federal judge on Tuesday said ICE agents likely violated a Rochester man’s First Amendment rights when they delivered a warning letter about an angry email he sent to the former agency head.
Judge Rudolph Contreras granted a preliminary injunction that stops the federal government from making good on the threat of prosecution over David Streever’s speech in the January email.
“Mr. Streever has a right to express his political views through non-threatening speech, however degrading the speech might be,” the judge wrote.
After federal agents killed two protesters in Minnesota, Streever sent an angry email to then-acting ICE director Todd Lyons. Six months later, ICE agents appeared at Streever’s door with a warning letter. When they did not find him at home, agents tried to track him down at a hotel in New York City.
Lawyers for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) sued the government in July for violating Streever’s First Amendment rights.
Contreras began his 43-page decision by writing “Americans have long voiced their displeasure with their government.”
What’s different today, he wrote, is how the government responded.
The judge said Streever’s email addressed “salient political decisions to a government official” and did not contain a physical threat. Streever registered displeasure with Lyons’s official conduct, forecast that the director would lose favor with the president and warned that the moral weight of his actions would haunt him in the future, the judge wrote.
“Although Mr. Streever’s email was not kind, and may not have been particularly productive, it was a far cry from a ‘true threat of violence’ sufficient for the email to shed its First Amendment protections,” he wrote.
The agents went beyond an investigation when they visited Streever’s home to deliver a warning notice, the ruling said.
Streever was the second person that ICE agents visited with warning letters in June.
The same agents walked into a primary election polling place to warn an election worker about a social media post from January.
Agents demanded Paigelynne Gonyea remove an Instagram post that they said threatened federal agents. In a January post, Gonyea named the federal agent who shot Renee Good in Minnesota. The name had been widely reported in the news.