ICE Tracked a Man for Months Over an Email It Won't Call a Threat

David Streever was on vacation in Finland with his daughter when two Homeland Security Investigations agents showed up at his house in Rochester, New York. It was June 23. His wife told them he wasn't home. So the agents pulled his return flight information, drove to John F. Kennedy International Airport two days later, and waited for him to land.

He cleared customs without being stopped. Undeterred, the agents pulled the hotel address he'd listed with border officials and went looking for him there. Hotel staff wouldn't confirm he'd checked in. He didn't return their calls. On June 30, the lead agent wrote a report saying the office had "exhausted all investigative leads" and closed the case.

What triggered a cross-state manhunt spanning a home visit, an airport stakeout, and a hotel search was an email. In January, after ICE officers fatally shot two U.S. citizens during an operation in Minneapolis, Streever wrote to then-acting ICE Director Todd Lyons comparing him to Reinhard Heydrich, a Nazi official who helped architect the Holocaust, and predicted Lyons would be "tormented" by guilt until his death. He didn't threaten violence. He didn't name any officer or share personal information. He hit send and, according to his lawsuit, didn't think about it again for five months.

Two Cases, One Pattern

Streever isn't the only person DHS has visited over words rather than actions. The same day agents tried to serve him a "Warning Notice" — a form stating he "MAY BE IN VIOLATION OF FEDERAL LAW" — agents handed an identical notice to Paigelynn Gonyea, a poll worker in Syracuse, Reason reported. Her offense was an Instagram post naming the officer who shot one of the Minneapolis victims — information she'd sourced from, and credited to, the Minnesota Star Tribune. Agents confronted her at her polling-place job and pressed her to sign the notice without a lawyer present.

Both notices came from ICE's Office of Professional Responsibility, which has run 131 investigations into alleged "doxxing and threats" against ICE personnel between January 2025 and March 2026, according to a court filing an ICE official disclosed in a separate case. Neither Streever's nor Gonyea's case, by the government's own account, involved an actual threat.

What DHS Says in Public, and What It Says in Court

The two venues tell different stories. When the Washington Examiner covered Streever's lawsuit in July, it ran DHS's full public rebuttal: the agency called claims that it was trying to "squash" free speech "categorically FALSE," and cited a "1,300% increase in assaults" against ICE officers, a "3,300% increase in vehicular attacks," and an "8,000% increase in death threats." Framed that way, tracking down an email writer sounds like due diligence in a genuinely dangerous climate. No outlet I reviewed, including the Examiner, put those percentages next to a baseline number, so a reader can't tell whether they describe a real surge or a handful of incidents multiplying off a tiny starting point.

Compare that to what DHS's own lawyers argued once the case moved into court. NPR's follow-up reporting — published August 17, after the government filed its motion to dismiss — found that federal attorneys never claimed Streever's email was an actual threat. Instead, they argued that "in-person investigatory visits from law enforcement — accompanied by prophylactic warnings about federal law — are a critical tool in the investigative and preventative process" that doesn't violate the First Amendment regardless of whether the underlying speech was protected.

That's a narrower argument than the public statement implies, and it's the one that actually matters for the lawsuit. Adam Steinbaugh, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression attorney representing Streever, told NPR the government's own filing "effectively concede[s] that this is protected political speech" while still insisting agents were right to issue the warning anyway. "I think that should send alarm bells ringing," he said, "because now you have the government saying, 'Yeah, we acknowledge this is protected political speech, but it's critical that we issue warning notices about this.'"

The Question the Coverage Keeps Skipping

Every outlet that's covered this story — NPR, the Washington Examiner, Reason, and the local Syracuse paper that broke it — has reported the facts consistently: an email, a five-month gap, a home visit, an airport chase, a warning notice. Where they diverge is in what they treat as the real story. Reason frames it as part of a documented pattern going back to at least last year's DHS decision to start collecting data on people who criticize ICE. The Examiner's write-through of DHS's statement frames it as reasonable caution in a hostile environment for federal officers. Neither framing actually resolves the narrower legal question NPR surfaced: if the government isn't arguing the speech was a threat, what's left of the justification besides "we can, so we did"?

That question is also where the story connects to a broader trend. A federal appeals court ruled in July that border agents can search a traveler's phone with zero individualized suspicion — another case where the government's authority to act preceded, rather than followed from, any evidence of wrongdoing. Streever's case and Gonyea's both fit that same shape: the investigatory tool gets used first, and the justification for why it was necessary gets built afterward, if it gets built at all.

DHS did not respond to a request for comment beyond its earlier public statement when NPR sought comment for its August story. Streever's case is still pending in federal court in Washington, D.C., where FIRE has asked a judge to block DHS from taking any further retaliatory action against him.

Sources & Further Reading

• DHS defends investigating agency critics and giving them warning notices — NPR, August 17, 2026
• Man sues DHS for tracking him down after email comparing Todd Lyons to a Nazi — Washington Examiner, July 6, 2026
• He Compared ICE's Chief to a Nazi, so ICE Tracked Him Down on Vacation With His Daughter — Reason, July 7, 2026