DHS Subpoenas I-9 Employment-Eligibility Records for 7,000+ Hennepin Healthcare Employees

On January 8, 2026, the Department of Homeland Security issued a subpoena for the I-9 employment-eligibility verification forms of more than 7,000 employees of Hennepin Healthcare, the operator of Hennepin County Medical Center and the state’s largest Level One adult and pediatric trauma center. The I-9 records sought include workers’ full names, home addresses, Social Security numbers, and employment-eligibility documentation. Co-interim administrators J. Kevin Croston and David Hough sent a memo to staff stating that the institution would comply, writing: “We are complying with this legal requirement, as failure to do so could result in civil or criminal penalties.”

The subpoena was issued less than a week after a Hennepin County commissioner and state legislators arrived at HCMC to confront ICE agents guarding the bedside of a hospitalized detainee (Alberto Castaneda Mondragon) without a judicial warrant. Reporting placed the action within a wider pattern in which Homeland Security Investigations was issuing a surge of employment-record subpoenas to small and mid-sized businesses, according to immigration attorneys.

Structurally, the subpoena marks an escalation from arrest-level enforcement to data-level enforcement: rather than targeting individuals at the point of contact, DHS reached into a public hospital’s personnel files to assemble identity and status information on its entire workforce. The timing — immediately following the bedside-guarding confrontation — reads as retaliatory pressure on an institution that had become a site of resistance, and it illustrates how employment-verification machinery becomes a surveillance instrument when paired with aggressive field operations.