This essay was originally published by Reason on Aug. 27, 2026.

Later today, a federal judge in Minneapolis will hear a motion for discovery in the Minnesota 15 antifa case. If granted, it could eventually reveal just how far the tentacles of the Trump administration’s vast surveillance, harassment, and intimidation campaign against its critics in Minnesota reached — and how much of it continues today.

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In mid-June, the federal government unsealed an eight-count indictment against 15 activists for allegedly interfering, sometimes violently, with the federal immigration crackdown that roiled the Twin Cities last winter, during which federal agents shot and killed Renée Good and Alex Pretti. One of those indicted, Isaac Sant, faces two counts: conspiracy to impede or injure a federal officer and interstate stalking.

Sant will have his day in court, and if the case goes to trial, a jury will decide whether the government has proved its case beyond a reasonable doubt. But as he and his attorney mount a defense, they have filed a motion for discovery accusing the federal government of “an unprecedented campaign by DHS (Department of Homeland Security) to spy on Minnesotans,” based on the government’s own initial disclosures.

Alleging that his prosecution is the result of a political witch hunt based on First-Amendment-protected activity, Sant and his attorney, Kevin C. Riach, are asking a federal court in Minnesota to force the government to release any and all communications and materials related to the charges Sant faces. (Earlier this week, Protect Democracy filed an amicus brief in support of Sant’s discovery motion on behalf of the Cato Institute, the Society for the Rule of Law, and the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.)

What has already been revealed in this case conjures up the ghosts of Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R–Wisc.) and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. At the center of it all is Homeland Security Investigations, the DHS’ principal criminal investigative arm, which is acting more like a domestic spy agency than a law enforcement agency bound by the Constitution.

During last winter’s Operation Metro Surge, undercover HSI agents surveilled and infiltrated meetings at churches, parks, libraries, schools, and union halls and gained access to encrypted Signal chats under initiatives dubbed “Operation Keyhole,” “Operation Puppet Master,” and “Project Whipple Shield.”

In one incident in February, an undercover agent wormed their way into a meeting at the Prince of Peace Lutheran Church in Roseville, Minnesota, a suburb bordering the Twin Cities. The undercover agent recorded the license plates of activists opposing Immigration and Customs Enforcement activity and then matched the plates to their owners, creating dossiers that included names, photos, addresses, and even more intimate details, such as information about their families and employment.

“None of these individuals did anything other than engage in First Amendment speech in a church meeting room,” wrote Riach in the discovery motion. “Yet now their personal information is memorialized in a DHS dossier.”

During a recent service at the church, interim pastor Steve Sylvester told his congregation that the federal government had surveilled the church last winter. “It feels weird,” Sylvester told NPR. “It feels like I’m living in 1950s Eastern Europe.” Sylvester’s church wasn’t the only one under watch in this American remake of The Lives of Others.

In May, another undercover agent wore a wire to a training held at University Baptist Church in Minneapolis and hosted by Left Jab, a lefty mixed martial arts club dedicated to “community self-defense.” The surveillance led to some black comedy. “Due to the physicality of the event,” reads the HSI report of investigation, the undercover agent’s “concealed body-worn audio recorder erroneously fell to the floor of the gymnasium near the end of the training. UCA–5022 briefly left the gymnasium, realized she no longer had the device, and returned to the gymnasium to retrieve the device from the floor.”

But Cody Sanders, interim pastor of University Baptist, wasn’t laughing. “I do imagine people will look over their shoulder a little more and wonder, ‘Is there someone here who’s trying to gather information?’ Or when they see a strange car in the parking lot,” Sanders told NPR. “I hope we can resist the kind of suspicion that this is likely to generate.”

But that’s a feature, not a bug, of these kinds of police-state tactics. Revelations like these supercharge the corrosive power of paranoia, making people fear that something they say or someone they associate with could land them in a federal database. Constitutional rights don’t mean much if you’re afraid to exercise them.

The authoritarian tactics, however, don’t stop there. Bypassing judicial scrutiny, HSI issued administrative summonses and subpoenas targeting the financial records of labor unions and progressive nonprofits. Without the organizations’ knowledge, the agency sought more than three years’ worth of records from the Service Employees International Union, Communications Workers of America, and the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers. They also sought financial records from the Sunrise Movement and Voices for Racial Justice, both progressive groups.

The federal government itself ties this investigation to National Security Presidential Memorandum–7 (NSPM–7). In HSI’s own report of investigation, the synopsis states plainly that the investigation at Prince of Peace church was opened in “accordance with” the memorandum.

Issued by President Donald Trump after the murder of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, NSPM–7 explicitly places political beliefs within its domestic terrorism framework. The policy directive describes “anti-fascism” as an umbrella under which “violent and terroristic activities” occur and lists beliefs such as “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity,” as well as what it calls “extremism on migration, race, and gender,” as among the “common threads” animating violent conduct. It then tasks the national and local Joint Terrorism Task Forces with coordinating and supervising “a comprehensive national strategy” and directs the Justice Department to pursue prosecutions.

In her December memo implementing NSPM–7, then-Attorney General Pam Bondi addressed civil liberties concerns in a footnote. “The United States Government does not investigate, collect, or maintain information on U.S. persons solely for the purpose of monitoring activities protected by the First Amendment,” the second footnote reads. “No investigation may be opened based solely on activities protected by the First Amendment or the lawful exercise of rights secured by the Constitution or laws of the United States.”

When NSPM–7 was issued, civil liberties organizations such as FIRE warned that the policy directive and its implementation would likely lead to the feds investigating government critics for First Amendment-protected activities absent any evidence of criminal wrongdoing. That prediction is now unfortunately coming true, despite the government’s assurances it wouldn’t cross the line.

In the months and years ahead, activists, journalists, lawyers, and legislators will try to get to the bottom of NSPM-7’s vast surveillance apparatus. Time will tell how many Americans were swept into these programs without evidence of wrongdoing and how many were chilled from exercising their rights to free speech and association.

This discovery motion is one of the first attempts to help uncover the truth.

Ronnie London is general counsel and director of litigation at FIRE.

A federal appeals court held Wednesday that a New Hampshire school district likely violated the First Amendment when officials punished parents for silently donning pink “XX” wristbands at halftime — and refusing to remove them — in protest of the opposing girls’ soccer team fielding a transgender player.

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That tracks with FIRE’s amicus brief arguing the trial court’s extension of student-speech precedent to adults in public forums is unprecedented, unwarranted, and a serious threat to adults’ exercise of First Amendment rights — rights school officials shouldn’t be policing at events open to the public simply because they disagree with the message.

The court reached its decision without answering whether speech by adults at a public high school event should be governed by the First Amendment rules for public forums, or those that give schools more authority over student speech, such as Tinker v. Des Moines, Hazelwood v. Kuhlmeier, Morse v. Frederick, and B.L. v. Mahanoy. The court also declined to decide whether those student-speech rules give schools the same power over parental or other adult speech.

Rather, the court focused on what it called the narrower “question at the center of this appeal” of whether school officials violated the First Amendment when they used the district’s “Public Conduct on School Property” policy to punish parents for wearing pink “XX” wristbands to protest transgender girls playing girls’ high school sports.

On that score, the court said, “the record evidence demonstrates the likelihood that the school district imposed sanctions … because it disagreed with the protest message conveyed.” That does not square with longstanding Supreme Court law holding “the government must abstain from regulating speech when the specific motivating ideology or the opinion or perspective of the speaker is the rationale for the restriction.”

The court cited the various school officials’ reasons for sanctioning the parents, including the superintendent’s statements that the “XX” symbol conveyed an “exclusionary” message about gender that was “intimidating, threatening, harassing, and discouraging,” and those by the principal who ordered the parents to remove the wristbands, who called the symbol “hateful” and “anti-trans.” In the court’s view, those statements showed school officials were objecting to the viewpoint behind what the parents were saying.

The court also rejected the school’s argument that it had a legitimate interest in restricting the parents’ speech because it might cause a disruption, a standard schools often invoke under Tinker. The evidence showed there was no disruption until school officials chose to intervene to punish the parents. The parents “did not stage any pregame demonstrations; did not march, shout, chant, or otherwise disrupt the game;” and did not confront the opposing player. Instead, they “waited until halftime before donning the ‘XX’ wristbands in a passive, silent gesture of protest.”

There was also “no evidence of harassment, given there is no evidence … any player actually saw the wristbands.” That undercut the school district’s claim it had an affirmative duty under Title IX to protect students from the speech, especially given the later-decided Supreme Court case that recently upheld state laws restricting sports participation based on sex assigned at birth.

As the court put it, “The characteristics of the school as a place of learning reinforce that administrators cannot favor one side of a debate involving parental speech on an issue of prominent public concern, and which, in those parents’ views, concerned the safety of their children.”

Because the silent display of the “XX” symbol fell short of disruption or harassment, the appeals court held the district court was wrong to conclude those interests justified restricting the speech. It accordingly returned the case to the trial court to determine whether to grant an injunction or if relief like a declaratory judgment would suffice.

Across the country, school libraries have become a recurring front in political and cultural fights, with controversial books drawing objections from parents, activists, and public officials alike.

Let’s be clear: Parents and community members have every right to criticize what their schools make available and ask officials to reconsider particular books. That’s free speech, too.

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The problem arises when one individual or group’s political views determine which ideas students can explore in their school library. Massachusetts’ Freedom to Read Law offers a promising solution, one that FIRE has long called for: due process for books.

That means fair and clear procedures for reviewing challenged library materials. The Massachusetts law establishes significant procedural safeguards for challenges to books in the state’s public school libraries. It’s consistent with many of our recommendations, such as considering challenged works as a whole, applying legitimate educational criteria rather than political preferences, and keeping challenged books available until the review is complete.

The Freedom to Read Law also limits who may initiate a formal challenge: current students, their parents or guardians, and school staff. That helps ensure the review process is reserved for members of the school community rather than outside groups seeking to dictate what books are available to students.

Before a challenged book can be removed, the law requires notice, a public hearing, and review by a committee of school personnel. The committee must find, based on clear and convincing evidence, that the material as a whole lacks educational, literary, artistic, personal, or social value, or is not age appropriate for any student at the school.

Just as importantly, the challenged book stays on the shelf while that process plays out. Removing a book first and asking questions later can accomplish the censor’s goal before anyone has determined whether the challenge has merit.

Of course, not every decision to remove a school library book is unjustified. Schools necessarily curate their collections for reasons such as educational suitability, quality, or age appropriateness. A book might be damaged or outdated, or removed simply to make room for new volumes. But the power to curate is not a license to censor.

Massachusetts’ law strikes a good balance. It lets schools maintain age-appropriate library collections, while minimizing the risk that books will be removed for illegitimate ideological or partisan reasons.

In Board of Education v. Pico, a plurality of the Supreme Court said school boards cannot remove books simply because they dislike the ideas in them. The justices emphasized that schools must follow “established, regular, and facially unbiased procedures for the review of controversial materials.” While school officials retain significant authority to oversee library collections, that authority remains subject to the First Amendment.

The new law also says that when adding books to a collection, selected material must “be age appropriate,” “serve an educational purpose,” and “be based on the teacher’s or employee’s professional training and not on personal, political, or doctrinal views.”

In other words, the law’s demand for viewpoint neutrality runs both ways. Librarians cannot use their authority to stock shelves according to their own politics any more than school boards can use theirs to purge books because they dislike the ideas inside them.

The Freedom to Read Law also protects school employees from punishment for good-faith decisions about library materials. Those protections can help ensure that fear of political retaliation does not dictate what students can read.

As schools implement the new law, they should also follow FIRE’s recommendation that review committees issue a written decision explaining their reasons for retaining, relocating, or removing challenged material. Written decisions enable public scrutiny, create a record for judicial review, and make it harder to disguise ideological censorship as a judgment about educational value or age appropriateness.

Book challenges are not going away. Clear procedures will not eliminate disagreement over what books belong in school libraries. But Massachusetts’ approach ensures those disagreements are settled through rules designed to keep official decisions focused on legitimate educational considerations rather than politics.

Other states should take note.

When government officials threaten to sue and prosecute their constituents over speech, the public should get to see the evidence.

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Earlier this year, the City of Manton, Michigan, passed a vague resolution condemning what it alleged was “a deliberate, ongoing, and escalating campaign of cyberbullying, online harassment, and personal attacks directed at City Commissioners.” Those so-called attacks included social media posts that allegedly contained “deliberate falsehoods” or threats, or targeted commissioners in “an offensive personal manner.”

The resolution placed “the individual or individuals responsible for this conduct on formal public notice that their behavior has been observed, documented, and reviewed.” It further stated the commission may direct the city attorney to explore legal remedies, including cease-and-desist letters, referring individuals to the county prosecutor for investigation, or bringing civil lawsuits.

What were the social media posts that led commissioners to pass the resolution? We don’t know, because the city refuses to say, even after FIRE filed a public records request.

In some circumstances, online communication can cross the line into true threats or unlawful harassment. But we’re not just going to take city officials’ word for it, especially when the speech at issue criticizes those same officials, giving them a personal incentive to suppress it.

Officials inflating the definition of “threats,” “harassment,” and “bullying” to encompass constitutionally protected speech is nothing new. And the resolution itself raises red flags, making references to “personal attacks” and “false,” “misleading,” and “inflammatory” statements — categories of speech that are not, absent more, outside the First Amendment’s protection.

While the resolution references Michigan’s harassment and cyberbullying statutes and acknowledges First Amendment protection for criticizing government officials, without being able to see the speech that actually led to the resolution, the public cannot independently judge whether the city is accurately applying the First Amendment’s narrow exceptions.

As the Supreme Court has recognized, the First Amendment reflects our “profound national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open,” and it “may well include vehement, caustic, and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks on government and public officials.”

Uncomfortable or offensive commentary doesn’t lose constitutional protection simply because elected officials slap a “harassment” label on it.

So, FIRE submitted a public records request for information about the commission’s adoption, discussion, drafting, interpretation, and potential enforcement of the resolution — including copies of the social media posts that prompted it. We’re concerned that the resolution might have been issued in response to protected speech and could have a broad chilling effect on Manton residents who regularly take to social media to criticize their elected representatives. In fact, FIRE had been privately contacted by several individuals who believed the resolution was intended to do just that.

The city refused to disclose records showing what prompted or justified the resolution, citing an exemption under Michigan’s Freedom of Information Act that permits officials to withhold certain kinds of personal information. The city said the withheld records included Facebook posts and other communications containing material that was “personally and emotionally offensive” to a commissioner and that further disclosure would constitute an unwarranted invasion of the commissioner’s privacy.

The city also said it had no records indicating it had pursued any of the legal remedies contemplated by the resolution. That’s good news, but FIRE still thinks the city has some explaining to do.

The Facebook posts may be “personally and emotionally offensive” to a city official, but that doesn’t mean they reveal the sort of intimate or confidential details that Michigan’s FOIA privacy exemption protects.

As we argued in our appeal of the city’s denial of our FOIA request, the city failed to meet its burden of proving that the withheld records are exempt from disclosure under Michigan law. The relevant exemption requires the government to prove both that the requested records are “of a personal nature” and, importantly, that the release of those records would constitute a “clearly unwarranted invasion of privacy.”

Even assuming that the withheld records are “of a personal nature” within the meaning of the law, the city can’t establish that releasing them would be a clearly unwarranted invasion of privacy.

First, to the extent any of the withheld records include publicly available social media posts, it’s hard to see how withholding them serves any privacy interest. The cat’s already out of the bag.

More importantly, those records would contribute significantly to public understanding of the city’s actions — which is the purpose of FOIA — and may be one of the few ways Manton residents can actually learn what sort of speech the city believes warrants legal action.

As we told the city: “The requested information forms the asserted factual basis for an official resolution in which the City makes serious allegations about the speech and conduct of members of the public and announces its intent to pursue legal remedies against them and potentially others.” How is the public supposed to meaningfully evaluate the city’s actions — including whether it is respecting First Amendment limits on its authority — without access to the communications on which they are based?

The city commission invoked particular communications to justify action against its residents. It can’t now hide that information from public scrutiny just because the contents are “personally and emotionally offensive” to a public official.

The city has 10 business days to respond to our appeal.