DHS agents visited Rochester man's home and tracked him to NYC hotel over email criticizing ICE director

On June 23, 2026, Homeland Security Investigations agents visited the Rochester, New York home of David Streever while he was abroad in Finland, leaving a warning notice with his wife that an email Streever had sent five months earlier to then-acting ICE Director Todd Lyons constituted a "credible threat." Streever's email, written in January 2026 in response to an ICE officer fatally shooting Minneapolis resident Renée Good during an anti-ICE protest, called Lyons "a monstrous human being" and predicted the ICE director would "go down in history as America's Reinhard Heydrich." Two days later, when Streever landed at JFK International Airport on his return from Finland, a Homeland Security Investigations agent tracked him to the airport hotel where he was staying and left a business card with the front desk, asking that he call back — a detail that raised questions about how agents located him, since he had not disclosed the hotel to anyone in advance. No criminal charges were filed.

Streever's email was sent in the immediate aftermath of the shooting of Renée Good, a bystander killed by ICE officer Jonathan Ross during an anti-ICE demonstration in Minneapolis. Attorneys representing Streever through the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) and the American Civil Liberties Union argued that the email was protected political speech and that the federal visits amounted to unconstitutional government intimidation. "It's government action that is sufficient to chill someone's speech," Streever's attorney said, "and intended to make someone say, 'It'd be better if I didn't talk.'"

The incident was part of a broader pattern of DHS and HSI scrutinizing and confronting individuals who criticized ICE. A separate June 2026 incident involved DHS agents entering a Syracuse, New York polling place to confront poll worker Paigelynne Gonyea over an Instagram post about the same shooting of Renée Good.

Updates

2026-07-06 — Streever sued DHS over the home visits and tracking [5, 6, 7]

On July 6, 2026, David Streever filed a federal First Amendment lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, alleging the June 2026 home visit and subsequent tracking to his New York hotel over his critical email violated his constitutional rights. Represented by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, he sought a declaration that the government's actions were unconstitutional and an injunction barring further action over the email. Coverage reported that ICE's internal watchdog had opened a broader inquiry into the agency's treatment of online critics.