'Minnesota 15' Case Reveals Largest US Government Spying on Left Since COINTELPRO
“These are exactly the kind of intelligence activities J. Edgar Hoover adopted to suppress the Civil Rights and anti-war movements in the 1960s," said one retired FBI agent.
The Trump administration is conducting what some experts believe is the largest government surveillance campaign targeting American leftists in over half a century, deploying undercover agents, drones, financial investigators, and digital monitoring against opponents of President Donald Trump’s deadly immigration crackdown, according to reporting published Wednesday.
Wired reporter Ali Winston examined court records regarding the prosecution of the so-called "Minnesota 15," a group of activists facing federal conspiracy charges after organizing and taking part in protests and other resistance to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE) deadly Operation Metro Surge crackdown in the Twin Cities.
The Minnesota 15 are members of the groups Direct Action Minnesota and Black Cat Workers, and are accused of impeding the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) anti-immigrant crackdown in Minneapolis, where US citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti were separately killed earlier this year by ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers and where Julio César Sosa-Celis survived being shot by an ICE agent.
Winston's investigation centers on Operation Puppet Master and Project Whipple Shield, probes conducted by Homeland Security Investigations, which is part of ICE. More than 120 HSI agents were assigned to the Minnesota campaigns, including at least 11 undercover operatives who infiltrated activist meetings, marches, training sessions, and encrypted Signal chats.
Those operations were authorized under National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7), which was signed by Trump following last year’s assassination of Charlie Kirk in an effort to target the left—even though leftists had nothing to do with the racist influencer's murder.
Federal agents also spied on gatherings in other states, photographed vehicles, deployed unarmed Reaper drones, and examined activists' digital records and financial transactions.
Civil liberties advocates and former law enforcement officials said the campaign evokes the Federal Bureau of Investigation's notorious COINTELPRO program, which surveilled, infiltrated, and sought to disrupt Civil Rights, Black liberation, anti-war, American Indian, and other movements during the tenure of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover—including by funding and arming murderous far-right militants to terrorize leftists.
As Winston noted:
According to a 2011 book by former [Central Intelligence Agency] officer Frank Rafalko, the CIA secret investigation into suspected foreign influence on the New Left and anti-Vietnam War movement had 42 officers working the case at its peak. Court records show 119 HSI agents worked on the Minnesota 15 case alone.
“Broad monitoring of social media, communications, and financial transactions are used to link an ever-increasing number of people as potential subjects of investigation and prosecution,” Mike German, a retired FBI agent critical of the post-9/11 surveillance state, told Winston. “These are exactly the kind of intelligence activities J. Edgar Hoover adopted to suppress the Civil Rights and anti-war movements in the 1960s.”