An office built to police ICE's own agents now spends much of its time on a different kind of target: the public. According to a Wired investigation, the agency's Office of Professional Responsibility has opened upward of 100 inquiries into private citizens accused of threatening ICE personnel or posting their personal details online — a pivot that has civil liberties attorneys asking whether an internal-affairs unit has effectively become an outward-facing enforcement arm against dissent.
An office meant to look inward
ICE's own description of OPR's mandate is narrow: investigate misconduct within the agency's ranks, and keep the workforce accountable to its own standards. Lawyers now representing people swept up in these cases say that mandate has quietly expanded to cover Americans who post critically about ICE, record agents at work, or fire off angry emails to the agency's leadership — none of which, on its face, resembles internal discipline.
A poll worker, an unsigned notice, and an Election Day visit
The clearest illustration played out inside a public library. On June 23, while working the polls during New York's primary election in Syracuse, Paigelynne Gonyea was approached by two agents who handed her an unsigned OPR warning notice, according to NPR's reporting. The notice traced back to a January Instagram post in which Gonyea had named Jonathan Ross — the officer identified by the Minnesota Star Tribune as having fatally shot Renée Good during immigration enforcement operations in Minneapolis. Gonyea refused to sign the document.
After the encounter drew national coverage, a DHS spokesperson released a statement claiming Gonyea had broken the law by publishing Ross's home address, adding, "if you doxx our officers, we will investigate you, and you will be brought to justice." There's a problem with that framing, though: ABC News reported that DHS never answered questions about why it called the post "doxxing" when it didn't contain an address, and NPR's follow-up noted the department did not respond to requests to substantiate the claim. Gonyea's original post — which merely repeated Ross's name after a newspaper had already published it — remains publicly visible on her account.
New York Representative John Mannion wasn't willing to take DHS's justification at face value either. He's formally demanded that Secretary Markwayne Mullin explain, in writing, by Friday, July 10, who authorized the visit, why OPR was involved at all, and how many other Americans have received similar letters.
An email in January, a knock on the door five months later
The same day agents confronted Gonyea, a separate pair showed up roughly 90 miles away at the Rochester home of David Streever. His alleged offense: an email sent five months earlier to Todd Lyons — then serving as ICE's acting director, not its Senate-confirmed chief — criticizing the agency's role in the Minneapolis shootings of both Renée Good and Alex Pretti. Streever was traveling in Finland with his young daughter when the agents arrived; his wife told them he'd be home within days.
That wasn't the end of it. Once Streever landed back at JFK Airport and checked into a nearby hotel for the night, a third agent showed up asking for him. Exactly what happened next depends on which account you read: the lawsuit itself, as CNN reported, describes an officer appearing in the hotel lobby, while NPR's more detailed reconstruction indicates the agent only spoke with the front-desk clerk and left a business card — Streever himself never saw the agent and only learned of the visit when hotel staff phoned his room after 9 p.m. Either way, nobody has explained how the agent located an unbooked hotel that even Streever's wife didn't know about.
FIRE senior attorney Adam Steinbaugh, who is now representing Streever in a lawsuit filed this week against DHS, argues the five-month gap undercuts any claim that the pursuit was really about safety: "If someone is really threatening a government official, you don't wait five months to act on it." The New York Civil Liberties Union has taken up a parallel argument on Streever's behalf, with the group's Perry Grossman calling it protected expression to press for answers after a fatal shooting: "Demanding accountability for officers responsible for killing U.S. citizens in broad daylight is a core First Amendment right." DHS, for its part, told NPR that any claim it's trying to suppress free speech is false, and pointed to what it described as a 1,300% jump in assaults on its personnel, a 3,300% rise in vehicle-based attacks, and an 8,000% increase in death threats — figures NPR says it has not independently verified.
Subpoenas that never see a judge
Beyond in-person visits, the government has leaned on paperwork that requires no court sign-off. Since early 2025, the New York Times reported that DHS and ICE have issued administrative subpoenas — demands tech companies can choose to fight or comply with — to platforms including Google, Meta, Reddit and Discord, seeking to identify the people behind accounts that track or criticize enforcement activity. How many such subpoenas exist is genuinely disputed: Hoodline's coverage notes estimates ranging from dozens to hundreds, and separate reporting citing correspondence with the tech companies themselves points toward the higher end of that range, though no government agency has released an official tally.
Two Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, cases show the pattern up close. One subpoena sought the identity behind an Instagram account that posts alerts about local ICE activity; another followed a resident who had simply emailed a DHS attorney asking for "common sense and decency" in a deportation case — after which, ACLU-PA said, a federal agent also visited his home. Both subpoenas were withdrawn only once the ACLU of Pennsylvania challenged them in court, and the organization is now suing separately after ICE ignored its public-records request on the broader practice. Senior attorney Stephen Loney, quoted by NBC10 Philadelphia, said the two residents were doing nothing more than "exercising their First Amendment rights to criticize the government."
The Electronic Frontier Foundation filed a nearly identical records lawsuit in April. Deputy legal director Aaron Mackey argued in the group's statement that "the public deserves to know what laws the agencies believe give them the power" to bypass judicial review this way. When Pennsylvania Representative pressed then-Secretary Kristi Noem on the practice during a congressional hearing, Noem said she didn't know how many subpoenas her department had issued, while insisting her investigators were operating lawfully.
Where the pattern leaves things
Taken together — the polling-place confrontation, the cross-state pursuit of a single email writer, and a paperwork campaign aimed at anonymous accounts — the picture that emerges is of an agency willing to combine street-level pressure with legal tools that skip judicial review, all aimed at people who criticize it rather than people accused of crimes. None of the lawsuits filed so far, whether by FIRE, the ACLU, or EFF, has produced a court ruling on whether OPR or its parent agencies may lawfully use these tactics against people who have not been charged with anything. Until one does, the groups challenging the practice say they expect the same sequence to keep repeating: a critical post, a subpoena or a knock at the door, and DHS insisting it's simply protecting its people.
