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David Streever was on vacation in Finland with his 7-year-old daughter last week when he noticed his doorbell camera back home had captured some unusual footage. In recordings from hours earlier, he could see what looked like two law enforcement officers in blue jackets waiting on his front porch in Rochester, N.Y.
Streever, 45, didn't grow concerned about it until he learned more about their visit from his wife, the Rev. Hilary Streever, 43, who is an Episcopal priest. She encountered the pair late on the afternoon of June 23 when she was arriving home with the couple's 2-year-old son, still wearing her clergy collar.
The agents were from Homeland Security Investigations, part of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and they were looking for David Streever. Hilary Streever told NPR the agents had said it was about "an email he may or may not have sent threatening Todd Lyons," the former acting director of U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement.
"He wouldn't have sent that," she recalled telling the agents. She told them her husband was out of the country and would be home Friday.
The agents asked Hilary Streever to tell her husband to call them back and left a form for him to sign. It said "WARNING NOTICE" and "YOU MAY BE IN VIOLATION OF FEDERAL LAW" and described federal laws that make it a crime to threaten federal officials. Later, the Streevers would learn the same agents presented the same form to a Syracuse poll worker earlier that day, and accused her of threatening an ICE officer on her Instagram account. Civil liberties advocates have criticized the agency's recent use of these forms, calling them an intimidation tactic to silence critics.
When Hilary Streever relayed the agents' message to David, he was puzzled. "I've never made a threat against anyone. I'm not a violent person," he told NPR. He did remember a strongly worded note he had sent to Lyons' government email address in January right after federal immigration officers fatally shot two people in Minneapolis.
In the Jan. 26 email, Streever, a former journalist who now works in the tech industry, warned Lyons that his own conscience would torment him in the future for his actions and compared him to a Nazi official. It is the only email he sent to Lyons, Streever said.
"One powerless citizen yelled into the void with a stern email to the former director of this agency six months ago," Streever told NPR. "And now there's agents at his door."
HSI's focus on Streever is the most recent in a series of actions the Department of Homeland Security has taken against protesters and critics in the past year.
Just a couple hours after Streever landed at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York on Thursday evening, a third Homeland Security Investigations special agent tracked him to the airport hotel he was staying at that night. The agent left a business card with the front desk, raising questions about whether Streever is under surveillance.
"This is clearly out of line," said Adam Steinbaugh, an attorney at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), which advocates for free speech, about the investigation into Streever.
The First Amendment protects the rights of Americans to voice their concerns to their government, Steinbaugh said. "The government doesn't have to listen to those, but it doesn't get to dispatch federal agents to your door and stalk you across the state of New York," he added.
DHS did not respond to questions about the case, including a request to confirm that the email that triggered the HSI agents to visit David Streever was the same Jan. 26 email reviewed by NPR. The department gave NPR a statement that said: "ICE investigates all credible threats towards its employees and officers, including threats to the ICE Director. As a matter of policy, we do not comment on any ongoing investigations."
Yelling into the void
Back in January, Streever said he was worried he was watching the country slip into fascism after seeing videos of federal officers fatally shooting observers Renée Macklin Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. He was particularly disturbed by administration officials' attempts to characterize both as domestic terrorists.
Streever felt he needed to register his moral outrage and condemn the violent acts.
"I want to be on the record," Streever recalled thinking. "I need to say something." Streever doubted Lyons himself would ever read his note but was hoping whoever did would "really think about right and wrong."
The email he sent had the subject line "What's next." Streever called Lyons a "monstrous human being" and predicted the ICE leader would "go down in history as America's Reinhard Heydrich, the butcher" — a reference to the Nazi official considered to be one of the architects of the Holocaust.
"The way you are protecting the obvious execution in Minnesota, even as we see the videos, will lead to your downfall. Even Trump will turn on you before the end, and you will be a sad, despised man who eats himself alive with shame at your own pathetic weakness.
"You will never know peace. You will seek to lose yourself, to escape the burden of knowing the truth about yourself. But wherever you go, you will find yourself. You will torment yourself until your last day on Earth," the email read.
Civil liberties advocates say Streever's email is not a threat.
"A threat is a serious expression of an intent to commit unlawful violence. That's not what this was at all. This is criticizing the director of ICE and appealing to his conscience and sharing [Streever's] own views," said Steinbaugh, who has talked with Streever about his case.
Streever's wife texted him a photo of the form the agents left for him.
It said that ICE's Office of Professional Responsibility "has identified an email sent to Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons, which it has reason to believe may constitute a violation of Title 19 of the U.S. Code. Accordingly, OPR is requesting that you promptly remove and/or discontinue the aforementioned behavior."
Streever wondered what that language meant, given that it had been five months since he sent the email.
At the bottom of the form it said, "Receipt of this Notice will be taken into consideration, should you continue to be involved in any criminal activities described above."
For months, DHS and ICE have been waging a crackdown on alleged threats against their personnel and doxxing attempts. Federal agents have sent administrative subpoenas to email and social media platforms to find out the identities of people who have posted about ICE anonymously.
"This danger is not hypothetical," said a recent statement from DHS. "Our officers are experiencing coordinated campaigns of violence against them."
Last year, Homeland Security agents visited a Philadelphia man's house to question him about a critical email he sent to a DHS attorney about the decision to deport an Afghan man who feared the Taliban would kill him if he returned.
"It's starting to look like a pattern of knocking on people's doors to ask them questions about clearly constitutionally protected speech. And that is very troubling," said Nathan Freed Wessler, the deputy director of ACLU's Speech, Privacy and Technology Project.
Civil liberties experts say Streever and the Syracuse poll worker are the first cases they are aware of that involved agents leaving a form to sign. Wessler said the forms "seem to be an escalation and a clear attempt to intimidate people."
Steinbaugh, the attorney with FIRE, posted on X asking for others to come forward if they received one of the forms.
"It is concerning to me that the government is coming up with a form to go to people and say, 'Your protected speech? We think it might be criminal. Knock it off,'" Steinbaugh said.
Tracked to his hotel
When Streever first learned about the HSI agents' visit from his wife last week, he tried not to think about it too much. He and his daughter were enjoying their visit to Moomin World, a Finnish theme park. He figured he would come home and call the agents back.
Once Streever and his daughter were on the plane home, he started to wonder if he would be stopped by federal officers when he showed his passport. But he and his daughter had no issues after landing at JFK International Airport a little after 7 p.m. on Thursday evening. They made their way to a nearby airport hotel to spend the night. He swiped his credit card as part of the hotel check-in a little after 8 p.m. and then he and his daughter went to sleep.
He was woken up sometime after 9 p.m. by the hotel room phone ringing. It was the front desk calling. A worried sounding voice on the other end told him that someone from Homeland Security had come looking for him.
"They said the investigator seemed to know I was there, left a card and said they should have me call him," Streever recalled. "I was really freaked out. How could this agent have found me?"
He looked at his phone and realized then that he had received two voicemail messages a few minutes before 9 p.m. from a New York number.
"Hi, this is Homeland Security Investigations looking for David Streever," a male voice said in a voicemail that was shared with NPR. A female voice left a similar message a minute earlier from the same number.
Streever read a news story on his phone that he had seen on social media earlier that day about a poll worker in Syracuse, Paigelynne Gonyea, who had been contacted by two HSI agents while she was working New York's primary election on June 23. The agents presented her with a form to sign that said her Instagram account may have violated the law.
Streever reached out to Gonyea on Facebook a little after 10 p.m. on Thursday and soon they were comparing notes. They determined the agents who had visited Streever's home in Rochester were the same pair who earlier that day had visited Gonyea at a Syracuse polling place.
Streever didn't sleep much that night. He said the hardest part was waking up his jet-lagged daughter so they could catch their train home and realizing he needed to prepare her in case federal agents confronted them.
"I can't imagine there is an age-appropriate, non-scary and non-terrifying way to tell a 7-year-old that these people might be looking for their dad," Streever said.
His daughter cried when he told her about the agents and she said she didn't want him to be killed.
"I haven't done anything wrong," he told her. "Be very calm. We're not going to panic."
On Friday morning, Streever stopped by the hotel's front desk and received an envelope with the business card of Trevor Pitts, the HSI agent who had visited the night before. The phone number on the card matched the number that had left the two voicemails on Streever's phone. When reached at that number, Pitts referred NPR to a New York ICE office for comment, though NPR did not receive a response.
It remains unclear how the agent tracked Streever to his airport hotel. He had not told the officers who checked his passport at the airport which hotel he was going to. Even his wife didn't know which hotel he had chosen.
Streever said he and his daughter took a roundabout route to catch a shuttle to the hotel and didn't see anyone else who could have been following them. HSI has access to a wide array of surveillance methods, and there are a number of potential ways the agent might have found Streever's location, including surveillance cameras, cell phone location data and credit card transactions, said Wessler of the ACLU.
The decision to put resources into tracking down Streever appears "more geared towards intimidation than actually any type of reasonable use of law enforcement resources," said Jeramie Scott, senior counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center.
"Is there abuse of surveillance technologies in this instance? I think that's a legitimate question, given that there's no other information here that suggests that this person is any kind of threat and warrants the attention of federal law enforcement officers," Scott added.
Wessler of the ACLU said too many details are unknown at this point to know whether surveillance of Streever may have violated the Fourth Amendment, which protects against illegal searches. But he said it "sure looks like a serious issue under the First Amendment," since it is a violation to threaten people with prosecution and intimidate them over protected speech.
"We do have a lot of power"
Something shifted for Streever after he found out the HSI agent had tracked him to his hotel.
He no longer wanted to call the agents back as he had originally planned.
Nothing unusual happened on the trip home, and he used the train ride to connect with civil liberties advocates and the office of his representative in Congress, Rep. Joe Morelle, D-N.Y. He wrestled at first with the decision of whether to share his story publicly and how it could affect his family and their safety.
While on the train, Streever's wife sent him a text about how the previous Sunday's gospel lesson kept coming into her mind.
"It's Jesus talking to his disciples and talking about the cost of discipleship… [that] it's not going to be peaceful," Hilary Streever told NPR. "You do have to tell the truth in public. And people won't like to hear it necessarily."
That helped the couple decide they should go public with what happened and continue to be critical of government actions they disagree with — despite the intimidating visits from federal agents.
Streever said one unexpected silver lining from this ordeal is that he no longer feels as powerless as he once did.
"If they hadn't come after me, I would have just been a guy whose sole act of defiance was writing a stern email to a faceless bureaucrat who was never going to read it," Streever said.
"But for them to come after me six months later for that one email, it makes me feel like we do have a lot of power. It makes me feel like they do care that we're speaking up."
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