ICE agents tracked Minnesota protesters to their homes, ACLU court filings revealed

Nearly 100 sworn statements filed February 13, 2026 in federal court -- part of an ACLU-led civil case, Tincher v. Noem, seeking to protect protesters' rights during the "Operation Metro Surge" immigration-enforcement deployment in Minnesota -- describe more than a dozen instances of federal agents identifying protesters' home addresses, apparently via license-plate tracking, and showing up there, most without an individually established date of their own. Daniel Woo, 29, said an ICE-linked SUV he had been monitoring in a St. Paul parking lot later drove to and parked in front of his home in Plymouth, Minnesota; he called it deliberate intimidation, saying agents were signaling "we know where you live."

A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said the agency "does not use force against peaceful protesters or stop cars without reasonable suspicion of a crime" and that protesters had caused "grave threats and dangerous situations," but did not address the specific episodes described in the filings. Woo's statement was filed by the ACLU, its Minnesota affiliate, and other lawyers as part of the civil case, which continued even after the Trump administration ended the roughly 3,000-agent Minnesota deployment earlier that month -- a move border czar Tom Homan called a "success." A separate declaration in the same filing, from Emily Beltz, describes an individually dateable January 26, 2026 incident in which an agent-driven SUV accelerated at her car before agents shouted her home address at her; that incident is recorded as its own entry rather than folded into this disclosure-dated one.