Overview: Unmasking corporate silence on local surveillance
Contributing Writer Clint Combs details a rally outside Target headquarters, where union leaders, religious clergy, and community organizers called on Minnesota’s corporate giants to denounce aggressive federal surveillance operations and defend local civil liberties.
Credit: Clint Combs/MSR
Union leaders, religious clergy and immigrant rights activists called for three major Minnesota corporations to condemn the sweeping federal surveillance campaign targeting activists and to sign the Business for Democracy Pledge outside Target headquarters in downtown Minneapolis on Aug. 17.
The rally came amid court filings that revealed Homeland Security Investigations deployed undercover federal agents into community centers, churches and libraries; infiltrated private encrypted communications; logged license plates of churchgoers; conducted facial recognition searches; and attempted to entice activists into more violent tactics in an effort targeting the movement opposed to Operation Metro Surge.
“Local businesses like Target, Cargill, Best Buy, 3M, please take note: your silence is complicity,” said Treasure Cay Thoreson, special educator with Minneapolis Public Schools and a Minnesota 15 defendant. “This bold-faced attempt to break our unity as Minnesotans cannot move us. Keep moving in love and solidarity.”
Thoreson described how investigators tapped phone conversations between co-workers and searched financial records well before Operation Metro Surge.
“I personally have had my phone records pulled with allegedly suspicious phone calls between myself and another MFE member that were flagged from last summer that had nothing to do with Metro Surge,” Thoreson said. “A GoFundMe that I donated to, passed by one of my colleagues for their brother who was suddenly deported to a country he hadn’t been to since he was a child, was flagged as evidence that I am part of a conspiracy.”
The court filings, released last Thursday, included a slide titled “The Conspiracy” presented to a grand jury that displays 18 groups, including the Grease Pit Bike Shop and the anti-racist martial arts dojo Left Jab, all connected to Direct Action Minnesota (DAMN).
Last month, prosecutors charged 15 people with conspiracy to impede federal immigration agents during Operation Metro Surge.
Marcia Howard, president of the Minneapolis Federation of Educators, Local 59, has been an outspoken activist since the murder of George Floyd. Howard saw the MFE Local 59 logo on the slide as a badge of honor.
“I call this the land of 10,000 lakes and 100,000 unindicted co-conspirators,” Howard said. “When you see that damn chart that I am proud to be on with MFE and all the other organizations that are on that flowchart. Are we on the list? Well, kind of chic to be on that list.”
U.S. Attorney Daniel Rosen dodged reporters when pressed for evidence that federal immigration agents were injured at the hands of the 15 Minnesotans charged last June.
“They all joined an agreement, a conspiracy, to interfere with lawful immigration enforcement operations. The conspiracy was not to interfere by their voice, but to do it by force,” Rosen said. “Whether or not they actually, at the end of the day, caused bodily harm is not the measure of whether or not they committed a serious federal crime.”
HSI special agent Desmond Garcia told the grand jury that investigators had a criminal basis for investigating each person, apparently at odds with what Rosen told reporters.
“One of the things that is abundantly clear, not only in guidance but as just a principle, as far as this investigation is, no one is ever investigated or looked at or even researched for First Amendment protected activities,” Garcia told the grand jury. “Every single individual that we have investigated, there is a criminal predicate to why we’re investigating them, either statements that they have made that are criminal or their actual participation in overt criminal acts.”
Court filings reveal that an undercover agent infiltrated a Sunrise Movement Twin Cities skills training at the Minneapolis Central Library and apparently tried to steer members toward more violent action. The agent told one member he works construction and could build items that might assist other groups with more “direct-action” protests, court filings read. The agent also told members that going to jail did not bother him.
“They did talk to one of our members, and just like when any new person that we have not vetted yet comes up to us with an idea, we listen, and we say thank you,” said Lacy Tooker-Kirkevold, police liaison for Sunrise Twin Cities. “We also stick to what we know how to do, and we don’t accept the help for actions that we’re not willing to take on and that aren’t within our scope of taking on either.”
Kevin Riach, the attorney representing Isaac Auman Sant, described in court filings how HSI used facial recognition to scan his client, producing a false match to a husband, his wife and their child.
“HSI are a bunch of bozos and Keystone Cops that don’t know what the hell they’re doing. They’re spying on some guy that’s not even related to me, that a computer thinks looks like me,” Sant said. “There was a time when ERO agents, ICE agents, were pulling up on people at the bus stop, scanning their faces and black-bagging them on the spot. I think this is unconscionable, and we need to roll back this surveillance state they’re building.”
Emilia Gonzalez Avalos, executive director of UnidosMN, said organizers had anticipated infiltration after Trump returned to the White House and built their training around transparency and constitutional rights.
“We have nothing to hide. We do not consent to you recording us or taking photos of us, but you can stay because we’re doing everything entirely grounded in the Constitution,” Gonzalez Avalos said.
Clint Combs is a freelance journalist and contributing writer for the Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder. He welcomes reader responses at combs0284@gmail.com.