HSI Inserts Undercover Agent Into Ann Arbor Church Sanctuary; ROI Names Reporting Agent Erin Herrgott and Approving RAC Darryl Pugh

Opening

At approximately 1745 hours on April 8, 2026 — fifteen minutes before a publicly advertised talk was to begin — a Homeland Security Investigations undercover agent entered the sanctuary of Zion Lutheran Church at 1501 West Liberty Street in Ann Arbor, Michigan, wearing a recording device.

The resulting Report of Investigation, filed under seal in the District of Minnesota and unsealed August 13, 2026, is unusual in one respect that most reporting on the Minnesota surveillance has not emphasized: its accountability block is not redacted. The attendees’ names are blacked out. The agents’ names are not.

• REPORTED BY: Erin Herrgott, Special Agent
• APPROVED BY: Darryl Pugh, Resident Agent in Charge
• DATE APPROVED: April 13, 2026

What Happened / Key Facts

The tasking chain. Per the ROI synopsis, on April 6, 2026, HSI Detroit Metro Airport received a collateral investigation request from the HSI Special Agent in Charge of Saint Paul, Minnesota — a third accountability node, identified by position but not by name in this document. Saint Paul requested “local support for Undercover Operatives to attend an event in Ann Arbor,” asserting the event “is believed to be linked to the ongoing investigation of suspects involved in violations of 18 USC 111 and 18 USC 372” (assaulting/impeding a federal officer; conspiracy to impede).

The case was opened April 7 — one day before the event. Request to church pew took two days.

The instruction was explicit. HSI Saint Paul requested “that UC Agent(s) attend the event equipped with recording devices to collect evidence in support of potential federal criminal charges.” This was not open-ended intelligence collection. It was evidence-gathering for prosecution, conducted inside a church sanctuary.

The event was public. CrimethInc. advertised the “Breaking the ICE” tour on March 23, 2026 with full addresses and times for 23 stops across 22 cities — Ann Arbor listed as April 8, Zion Lutheran Church Sanctuary, 1501 West Liberty Street, 6 pm. The ROI itself concedes the tour “was advertised via open source.” Nothing was infiltrated in the sense of penetrating something concealed.

What the agent recorded. UCA 9759’s summary describes approximately 20 individuals seated, ages early 20s to late 70s. The agent spoke with attendees including a married couple who were Zion Lutheran members; recorded that the church had been approached and asked to host; recorded that the husband and a small group of members “are part of a group that supports the ideals of the Minnesota resistance”; recorded that the wife “was part of a mission team that traveled to Uganda, where they assisted in the construction of a hospital”; and transcribed her business card into the federal file. The UCA also collected pamphlets, stickers, and other distributed materials and turned them over to HSI special agents.

Per Religion News Service, the report “includes information on Michigan church members who were not part of the targeted Minnesota activist group but who attended the event because they opposed ICE.”

The attendance figures are consistent, not contradictory. Page 2 records approximately 20 individuals seated when UCA 9759 arrived at 1745. Page 3 records that “by the beginning of the presentation, there were approximately 75 to 100 individuals in attendance.” The agent arrived fifteen minutes early; the room filled. The 75-100 figure reported by Michigan Advance and RNS is the ROI’s own.

What the agent recorded during the presentation. Four presenters, three female and one male. UCA 9759 “recognized the male presenter as Callum ROBINET also known as ‘Juliet’” — recognized, implying prior identification from elsewhere in the investigation. Robinet is named in a federal investigative file and is not among the fifteen defendants.

The presenters described the events leading to the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti; the formation of “Rapid Response Networks” operating over Signal to locate and identify ICE agents in greater Minneapolis; and protests at the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building — the building for which Project Whipple Shield is named — including one where protesters “deployed copious amounts of sex toys.”

One presenter, recalling an incident in which ICE agents were “allegedly” attacked with a shovel, “stated something to the effect of how she wished someone would attack ICE agents with a shovel.” The agent’s own hedges — allegedly, something to the effect of — fence the single arguably chargeable utterance in the report. It is a wish, expressed at a public meeting, recorded by a hedging witness.

The collection basket. The presenters passed a basket asking for donations to fund their travel. “UCA 9759 received the basket and observed multiple cash donations within the basket and a piece of paper that contained a QR code,” and the associated URL was recorded into the report (redacted in the filed copy). A church collection basket, passed hand to hand, was inventoried into a federal investigative file. This is not incidental: 2026-02-15–project-whipple-shield-hsi-financial-surveillance-minnesota-unions is the financial arm of the same investigation, which used administrative summonses — no warrant, no judge — to obtain years of SEIU and CWA records and PayPal and Venmo transactions for Voices for Racial Justice.

An attendee written up for advertising a protest in Romulus. “One of the attendees, a younger female, took the opportunity to advertise a weekly anti-ICE protest in the Romulus area.” She spoke at a public meeting and entered a federal investigative file.

Romulus is not an arbitrary Detroit suburb. On February 4, 2026, DHS bought a ~250,000-square-foot warehouse at 7525 Cogswell Street, Romulus for $34.7 million, to convert into a 500-detainee ICE facility. Michigan AG Dana Nessel had demanded ICE halt the plan on February 27 and sought transparency on March 5; on March 24 — fifteen days before this church operation — the City of Romulus and the State of Michigan jointly sued DHS in the Eastern District of Michigan (Case 2:26-cv-10968-JJCG-EAS) to block it. See 2026-03-24–michigan-romulus-sue-ice-dhs-detention-warehouse.

The weekly protest this attendee advertised was, on the available evidence, directed at that facility — a federal acquisition the State of Michigan was at that moment suing to stop. An HSI agent recorded her publicizing it, so the federal file now contains a note that someone promoted lawful protest against a purchase then under challenge by that state’s own attorney general.

What this does NOT establish. The Romulus litigation is not documented as a reason for the tasking, and should not be written as one. The ROI’s stated predicate is the Minnesota conspiracy investigation (18 U.S.C. §§ 111 and 372); Romulus appears in the document only as content the agent collected at the event. A per-city scope check across all 22 tour cities (see breaking-the-ice-tour-per-city-surveillance-scope-check) tested whether Michigan’s active DHS-litigation posture explained why Ann Arbor specifically drew tasking, and found no source stating or implying that HSI Saint Paul knew of or acted on the Romulus suit. The convergence is real and worth recording; the causal claim is unsupported.

The report closes: “This investigation continues.” UCA 9759 departed at 2010 hours, having also taken one of each pamphlet, sticker, and reading material from a table near the entrance and provided them to HSI DMA special agents.

Zion Lutheran is one of at least five churches entered. Per RNS court-records review: First Universalist, Minneapolis (Dec 13); Prince of Peace Lutheran, Roseville MN (Feb 1); Zion Lutheran, Ann Arbor (Apr 8); St. John the Evangelist Episcopal (Apr 14); University Baptist (May 28). Lutheran, Baptist, Episcopal, Unitarian Universalist. Ann Arbor is the only one outside Minnesota.

The pastors did not know. Zion Lutheran is led by Pastors Jim Debner and Greer Cherney. Multiple pastors across the affected congregations said they learned of DHS presence in their buildings only when the filings were reported in August 2026.

Why It Matters

This is the documented mechanism by which Operation Puppet Master left Minnesota. Most coverage describes the operations as Twin Cities infiltration. The collateral-request structure shows the investigation tasking field offices wherever the speaking tour went — with a two-day turnaround, on a publicly posted schedule of 22 cities. Whether the other 21 stops drew similar tasking is, as of this entry, an open and unasked question.

It names operators. The corpus documents the structure of this apparatus at length. The structure did not decide to put a recording device in a church sanctuary; people did, and this filing names two of them plus the position of a third. Erin Herrgott wrote the report. Darryl Pugh approved it on April 13, five days after the operation. The SAC Saint Paul originated the request. That an action is institutionally routine does not make it unauthored — see evidentiary-layer-control-after-federal-killings for the same principle applied to the post-killing record.

Neither Herrgott nor Pugh has a discoverable public profile as of this entry. Their names are public solely because a defense attorney moved to unseal the discovery in United States v. Sant et al.

The legal exposure is specific, and the injunction did not reach this building. Defense attorney Kevin Riach argues the surveilled parties “were engaging in First Amendment-protected activities” and that the investigation is “unlikely to withstand scrutiny.”

On February 13, 2026 — eight weeks before this operation — Judge F. Dennis Saylor IV granted a preliminary injunction in New England Synod, ELCA v. DHS, 4:25-cv-40102 (D. Mass.), finding plaintiffs likely to succeed on their RFRA claim: the January 20, 2025 rescission of the sensitive-locations policy substantially burdens religious exercise by discouraging attendance, and is not the least restrictive means of enforcing immigration law. The order bars warrantless enforcement inside plaintiff churches, at their entrances, on adjacent property, within 100 feet of entrances, and bars checkpoints to interrogate people traveling to or from them.

Relief is limited to the named plaintiff organizations and their identified facilities. The ELCA plaintiffs are five synods: New England, Greater Milwaukee, Southwest California, Southwest Texas, and Sierra Pacific. Zion Lutheran is ELCA but sits in the Southeast Michigan Synod, which is not a plaintiff — so the injunction did not apply to 1501 West Liberty Street. University Baptist in Minneapolis, which was covered, has filed statements with the court noting the injunction should have blocked DHS activity on its property.

That distinction is the finding, not a technicality. A federal court has held this policy likely violates RFRA. The holding protects only those congregations whose denominational bodies happened to sue. Same denomination, same policy, same conduct, different synod — and the conduct in Ann Arbor may have been lawful for no better reason than that no court had yet been asked about that particular building.

One further detail from the same docket: the injunction required plaintiffs to file a list of protected facilities with addresses. They moved to impound it rather than hand DHS a consolidated roster of protected churches. On February 26, 2026 Judge Saylor denied the motion, reasoning that church locations are “freely available to the public,” while cautioning that retaliatory action would be contempt. The publicness that made the list unsealable is the same publicness this ROI invokes when it notes the tour “was advertised via open source.” DHS meanwhile obtained repeated extensions to answer the complaint — the most recent to April 13, 2026, the day Darryl Pugh approved this report.

How much weight the ROI’s own account carries

Everything above about what happened inside that sanctuary comes from one source: UCA 9759’s summary, written up by SA Herrgott. There is no independent recording of that room. The ROI itself says its account “is a summary and not a verbatim account.”

That matters more than it would in the abstract, because HSI affidavit practice in this exact enforcement context has a documented reliability problem. In Minnesota, under the same operation (Metro Surge), the same statute (18 U.S.C. § 111), and the same agency, HSI Special Agent Richard Berger filed sworn affidavits in at least 25 cases and more than half have been dropped — 19 Minnesota assault-on-officer prosecutions dismissed as of 2026-07-30. Magistrate Judge David Schultz, on the record: “concerned with the veracity” of multiple Berger affidavits, and that Berger “did not have any personal knowledge of the events described in the affidavits that he has submitted to this court as sworn affidavits” (CBS Minnesota, 2026-08-06) He called one “a fake affidavit,” finding the prosecution’s own video did not support the language used. See section-111-protest-dismissal-opinions-what-judges-said (verified across KSTP, CBS Minnesota, FOX 9, KFGO).

This establishes nothing false about the Ann Arbor ROI. Berger is not its author and no court has questioned it. What it establishes is the evidentiary-weight question: where an HSI agent’s uncorroborated characterization of events has been judicially found unreliable across two dozen sworn statements in the same operation, an uncorroborated characterization of a church sanctuary should be attributed as what the agent wrote, not reported as what occurred.

Practical rule for any piece drawn from this entry: write “the agent’s report states that…” and not “at the meeting, X said…”. The distinction is small on the page and large if the account is ever contested.

Open Questions

• The identity of the HSI Special Agent in Charge, Saint Paul who originated the collateral request RESOLVED 2026-08-20: Steven Schrank, per his signature on two FedWire/CHIPS financial summonses in the same discovery set. See us-v-sant-0-26-cr-00115-doc-212-full-roi-set.
• Whether the other 21 “Breaking the ICE” tour stops drew comparable collateral tasking — still open; the retrieved 31-document set contains no other collateral-case ROIs.
• Whether Herrgott or Pugh appear in other ROIs in this discovery set RESOLVED 2026-08-20: Neither appears elsewhere in Doc. 212’s 31 attachments. Herrgott and Pugh’s roles were specific to the single Ann Arbor collateral case (DDO2PR26MS0003); the Minnesota-based Puppet Master/Whipple Shield ROIs are approved throughout by SSA Hakan Catalan instead, with SAs Jacob Marquis, Katherine Wespetal, Timothy Gorman, and Terri Botterbusch as reporting agents. Full roster in us-v-sant-0-26-cr-00115-doc-212-full-roi-set.
• Whether UCA 9759 is the same undercover agent reported by The Intercept as having offered to “build items” for direct action to a Sunrise organizer after a January 31 training RESOLVED 2026-08-20, negative: ROI 212-11 (the Jan 31 Sunrise Movement training) shows the “build items” offer was made by UCA 9833, not UCA 9759. UCA 9759’s only other confirmed appearance is alongside UCA 5022 at a Feb 2 50501 Minnesota meeting. They are distinct operatives.
• Whether Zion Lutheran or the Southeast Michigan Synod has taken or is considering legal action — still open.
• Whether any Ann Arbor voice (Pastors Debner/Cherney, a Zion Lutheran member, or the Southeast Michigan Synod) has spoken publicly, on the record, about this surveillance CHECKED 2026-08-20, verified absence: no named Ann Arbor voice has yet gone on record. Michigan Advance’s flagship story (read in full) contains no church quote despite the reporter visiting the building; RNS, Word&Way, and four other outlets covering the broader multi-church pattern mention Ann Arbor only via the ROI. Attendee detail (Uganda mission trip, business card, Romulus protest) should continue to be sourced as quoted-from-the-surveillance-document, not rendered as witness testimony, until this changes. See verified-absence-no-named-ann-arbor-voice-on-record-zion-lutheran-surveillance-2026. Re-check periodically — story is still developing.
• ~The remaining page of this ROI (page 3 of 3) and the rest of the 30 unsealed reports RESOLVED 2026-08-20: All 31 attachments to Doc. 212 retrieved and archived with SHA-256. See us-v-sant-0-26-cr-00115-doc-212-full-roi-set for the full roster, accountability chain, and newly surfaced material (SAC Saint Paul named, Isaac Sant named directly in the government’s own surveillance ROIs, “The Conspiracy” org chart, financial-subpoena detail on SEIU/CWA/Sunrise/Voices for Racial Justice, and additional church/union-hall operations at St. John the Evangelist Episcopal, Prince of Peace Roseville, and the United Labor Center).

Cross-References

• 2026-08-13–operation-puppet-master-hsi-infiltrates-minnesota-anti-ice-community
• evidentiary-layer-control-after-federal-killings
• 2025-03-15–hsi-agent-fatally-shoots-ruben-ray-martinez-south-padre-island