Deep inside ICE operates a kind of American Stasi with the power to target its own citizens. It is called Homeland Security Investigations, or HSI, the country’s second-largest criminal investigative agency after the FBI, but equipped with broader powers. And the most dangerous federal agents in America may also be the most incompetent.
A rare look inside came from the Justice Department’s ongoing attempt to stitch 15 anti-ICE activists from Minnesota into a sprawling “Antifa” conspiracy. The files disclosed in the process are disturbing and grotesquely clumsy at the same time. Rarely does an intelligence agency expose itself as completely as it does in these documents.
Three findings stand out from the files. An undercover agent was surveilling a church gym when her hidden wire fell out of her clothing, something she did not notice until later. Hunting for an alleged terrorist-financing network, HSI secretly subpoenaed years of bank records from the SEIU labor union and ultimately found nothing but expenses for strike supplies and dues from retirees. Dental benefits for members were in there too. Prosecutors finally presented a grand jury with an Alex Jones-style HSI presentation titled “The Conspiracy,” in which a bicycle repair shop was elevated into a hub of a criminal network.
And yes, really: In its own investigative report, HSI records that an undercover agent dropped her concealed wire onto the floor of the gym. She did not notice it was missing until after she had already left the room and had to go back to retrieve it. For about three minutes, the wire kept recording without its owner. 🤣 🤣 🤣 🤣 🤣 🤣
The files in our possession call the operation Operation Puppet Master - yes, that really is the official name - a secret effort to infiltrate anti-ICE groups that HSI considers front organizations for domestic Antifa terrorists. In one document, HSI St. Paul announces that identifying the funding sources and organizational structures behind these campaigns will be given priority. Outwardly, ICE presents a different face. Its statements celebrate the pursuit of child sex offenders, an almost untouchable shield because nobody is going to object to prosecuting pedophiles. Behind that shield, a lot of other things can happen without anyone looking. Meanwhile, HSI quietly grew into a barely controlled domestic intelligence service that, under the label of counterterrorism, has long been scrutinizing labor unions and environmental groups. Nonprofits and protesters are now on its list as well.
This is what that looked like in practice. At the Minneapolis Public Library, two undercover agents sat through a class, and their report is a record of absolutely nothing. The most important finding: one attendee had curly red hair, though the report does not tell us whether the color was natural. Another agent slipped into a meeting under the slogan “Stop the War on Iran!” but forgot to record either audio or video. As suspect number one, he noted a “heavy-set young white woman,” remarkable only because she had attended once before.
An official HSI investigative report dated June 23, 2026, explicitly records as an observation that a woman with curly red hair directed attendees to a Sunrise Movement meeting at the Minneapolis Public Library. Apparently, the undercover operation did not produce much more than that at this point. WOW, what a breakthrough, and it gets even better.
This HSI report also reads more like a collection of random notes than a terrorism investigation. An undercover agent observed a “Stop the War on Iran!” event on March 7, 2026, but recorded neither audio nor video. The person he ultimately flagged as noteworthy was a “heavy-set young white woman” - mainly because he had already seen her at an earlier event. Oops. Oops
As ridiculous as that sounds, what is frightening is how deeply HSI has already worked its way into the everyday lives of ordinary citizens.
When HSI wants to know something, it sends its own undercover people and a network of informants. They showed up in person at meetings and on video calls. They joined encrypted chat groups and made recordings. They combed through social media and wrote down license plates to draw connection charts, the kind of network map normally used to chart an insurgency.
HSI turned political contacts into a “conspiracy network”: On the internal slide titled “The Conspiracy,” the Direct Action Minnesota Network sits at the center, connected to labor unions and political groups. The presentation looks more like a map of a terrorist network than ordinary political cooperation.
The methods reached right up to the edge of entrapment. One undercover agent told an organizer that he worked in “construction” and could build things that might be useful to other groups for more forceful “direct action”; going to jail, he said, did not bother him. A second offered to set up a donation platform for the activists, a remarkably convenient way to follow a money trail that had not existed in the first place.
Operation Puppet Master officially began on January 28 of this year, exactly four days after federal agents shot and killed activist Alex Pretti. The goal, according to the files, was the digital and in-person penetration of the activist scene in Minneapolis. Local and nationwide investigations are part of it, including the secret acquisition of financial records from several labor unions, among them SEIU and the Communications Workers of America. Social justice organizations such as the Sunrise Movement and Voices for Racial Justice have also come under scrutiny.
Why is a customs agency doing this instead of the FBI? Because HSI is allowed to do things the FBI is not. Its powers are a legal Frankenstein creation. Title 19 of customs law is stitched together with Title 8 of immigration law. On top of that sits Title 18 covering general federal crimes, held together with a bit of Title 50 for war and defense. At those seams, the Fourth Amendment dies. What began as the authority to control the movement of goods now reaches for people who gather and speak. Before Congress in 2024, an agency representative called its powers “unique” and described a field ranging from “terrorism and national security threats” all the way down to “organized retail crime.”
What ICE and Homeland Security Investigations are doing with their sweeping powers is dehumanizing - and anyone who thinks dreams like these exist only in Trump’s America should take a look at the AfD’s platforms.
Its domestic presence is enormous. There are 235 field offices grouped under 30 regional headquarters. They reach into all 50 states. More than 10,000 employees and contractors make up the apparatus, including more than 7,000 special agents and 1,000 criminal analysts. Add to that a network of roughly 2,800 partners from state and local task forces brought into federal service. HSI provides the second-largest contingent to the Joint Terrorism Task Forces, or JTTFs, after the FBI itself - once created to go after al-Qaeda, today an instrument of domestic politics under Director Kash Patel.
Also read our earlier investigation: Who Are the People with the Masks? - How Trump Diverts Tens of Thousands of Investigators from Real Police Work
Much of this has little to do with terrorism, and actual cases remain rare. Former HSI Deputy Assistant Director Louis A. Rodi III put it plainly: only a few cases ended with the JTTF actually bringing “terrorism” charges; when that charge could not be sustained, HSI offered “non-traditional disruption options.” Translated, that means: when the task force does not find terrorism, HSI searches what is left for its own enemies. Other legal tools take the place of an indictment. Immigration status checks and customs subpoenas are part of it. Administrative inspections and orders to produce records are added. And when nothing else works, secret surveillance and pressure on informants help harass and dismantle targets when the evidence for a serious criminal charge is missing.
Read also our articles: Trump's Secret Police Spying on Americans? - The Fabricated Minnesota Conspiracy
That is how HSI does the Trump administration’s dirty work, protected by its low public profile and its enormously broad mandate. A page added to the HSI website earlier this year helpfully explains that terrorism can also be “domestic,” namely when “social or political objectives influence the attacks in the terrorist’s home country.”
The brazenness keeps growing. On August 6, a police officer in Richfield noticed a woman parked outside the community center where Rep. Ilhan Omar was holding a town hall. The license plate was registered to a different vehicle. The woman said she was part of event security; Omar’s security detail said she was not. Only then did she identify herself as an HSI agent, supposedly working an undercover drug operation. The next day, Omar wrote to Michael McCarthy, the acting head of HSI’s St. Paul office, saying the fake plates violated state law and broke commitments HSI had already made to her office; in other words, her staff had been forced to have this conversation before.
When HSI cannot find a conspiracy, it doubles down, convinced that the conspiracy must simply be buried too deeply and concealed too well to be discovered. A gift from bureaucracy to itself, one that keeps feeding itself.
What looks in Minneapolis like a very American story does not stop at the borders of the United States. It becomes explosive anywhere a political force gains access to agencies that conduct surveillance and keep people in files for years. In Germany, that question will become very practical in just a few weeks. In Saxony-Anhalt, the AfD is fighting to take control of the government, raising the possibility that a party could assume political responsibility for the Interior Ministry and for the very domestic intelligence agency that has classified its own state branch as a confirmed right-wing extremist organization since 2023.
This is not made up. If the AfD took over the government there and controlled the Interior Ministry, it would at least politically sit above an agency that still monitors it today. Officials are already discussing what information other state intelligence agencies or the federal government could even trust such a ministry with. Germany’s domestic intelligence system does not operate in 16 sealed-off drawers; intelligence on right-wing extremism and espionage moves between the states and the federal government, as do warnings about possible attack plans. If one part of that system comes under the control of a party that is itself under surveillance, Germany enters territory for which the Federal Republic has little practical experience.
The situation is even more explicit in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. There, the AfD has put in writing what it intends to do with the state domestic intelligence agency if it comes to power. In its governing platform, it announces a “fundamental reform” of the agency. Cybercrime and counterespionage would take priority, along with the “defense against political militancy.” Even a “complete reorganization” of the domestic intelligence agency should not be off the table. The phrase “political militancy” is especially troubling because it leaves open who would fall under it under a new government and at what point opposition becomes a surveillance target.
What a conscience can still do became clear elsewhere. When the Justice Department refused to investigate the ICE agent who killed Renee Good and instead pressured the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Minneapolis to scrutinize Good and the people around her, six experienced prosecutors resigned. At least four senior officials left the Civil Rights Division unit that investigates deadly police violence. Roughly a dozen employees chose to leave rather than take part. At HSI, as far as is known, nobody resigned. An apparatus that never doubts itself sees no reason to stop. While the agency keeps running in circles, Americans are paying the price - with their tax dollars and with their freedom.
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