David Streever Sues DHS Secretary Mullin Over ICE 'Warning Notice' Served on His Wife for a Critical Email — Same-Day Second Notice to Syracuse's Paigelynne Gonyea, Two Documented Instances

Opening paragraph

David Streever, a Rochester, New York writer and journalist, sued Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin and named ICE and Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) personnel in federal court on July 6, 2026 (Streever v. Mullin, D.D.C. 1:26-cv-02356), after ICE agents served his wife with an “OPR WARNING NOTICE” over an email Streever had sent five months earlier criticizing then-Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons. The same two agents, on the same day, served a substantially identical notice on Paigelynne Gonyea, a Syracuse poll worker, over an Instagram post. FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression) represents Streever and filed a motion for a preliminary injunction the day after the complaint. The corpus documents exactly two instances of this specific mechanism — an in-person ICE Office of Professional Responsibility “Warning Notice” served on an individual over online or emailed criticism of the agency — both from June 23, 2026, both from the same two-agent team.

What Happened / Key Facts

The trigger. On January 24, 2026, federal agents participating in Operation Metro Surge shot and killed police observer Alex Pretti in Minneapolis; the New York Times’ contemporaneous video analysis found Pretti was holding a phone, not a weapon, and was “on his knees and restrained” when agents opened fire (complaint ¶¶52-58, citing the Times’ Jan. 25, 2026 timeline reconstruction). The complaint’s ¶¶52-58 describe only the Pretti killing — the single incident that triggered Streever’s email — and that is a complete account of what Streever pleaded, not a count of every fatal Metro Surge shooting: Pretti was Operation Metro Surge’s second Minneapolis fatality, following ICE agent Jonathan Ross’s fatal shooting of legal observer Renée Nicole Good on January 7, 2026 (see 2026-01-07–ice-agent-kills-legal-observer-minneapolis-operation-metro-surge). NPR’s Aug. 17, 2026 “federal immigration officials fatally shot two U.S. citizen observers in Minneapolis” refers to this pair — Good and Pretti — not to a second, less-covered victim within the Pretti incident itself; see resolution in Research Gaps below. Two days after the Pretti killing, on January 26, 2026, Streever emailed Todd.M.Lyons@ice.dhs.gov — the ICE Acting Director’s publicly listed government address — a three-paragraph message under his own name and photograph, condemning Lyons’ defense of the agents and comparing the agency’s conduct to Nazi Germany (complaint ¶¶68-70).

The notice. Five months later, on Tuesday, June 23, 2026, ICE Special Agents David Brodie and Abbi Henry went to the Streevers’ Rochester home while Streever was traveling in Finland with his seven-year-old daughter. Rev. Hilary Streever, his wife, encountered the agents on the porch; a doorbell camera recorded them, including one agent looking in a window. The agents told her Streever “may or may not have” sent a threatening email to Lyons and needed to speak with them (complaint ¶¶71-78). They left an ICE OPR “WARNING NOTICE” document declaring “YOU MAY BE IN VIOLATION OF FEDERAL LAW,” citing 18 U.S.C. §115(a) (threats against federal officials) and identifying the trigger as “an email sent to Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons” (complaint ¶83). The notice demanded Streever “promptly remove and/or discontinue” the “behavior” and sign and return the document; he did not.

The hotel visit. Streever and his daughter flew back into JFK from Finland on a Thursday and checked into a New York City hotel. At approximately 9:00 p.m., a hotel clerk woke Streever to report a DHS agent had come to the front desk looking for him and left a business card identifying the agent as Special Agent Trevor J. Pitts of HSI’s Jamaica, New York office — a third named agent, distinct from Brodie and Henry. Streever’s wife had not disclosed the hotel name to anyone, and the complaint states Streever had “no idea” how agents located it. That question is now answered — see the resolution below: the government’s own sworn declaration says agents used the destination address Streever listed with CBP on his inbound arrival. The complaint’s framing reflects what was known to plaintiffs at filing, not the current record (complaint ¶¶90-95). That evening he also received two voicemails from callers identifying themselves only as “Homeland Security Investigations.”

The same-day second notice — Gonyea. Complaint ¶99 states verbatim: “Streever is not the only recipient of a ‘WARNING NOTICE’ in recent days.” The next six paragraphs (¶¶100-105) describe only one other case: on the same Tuesday, June 23, 2026, while Syracuse resident Paigelynne Gonyea was volunteering as a poll worker during New York’s primary election, Special Agent Brodie called her, then he and Special Agent Henry — the identical two-agent team from the Streever visit — came to her polling place and handed her a “WARNING NOTICE” over an Instagram post about an ICE agent. Complaint ¶102 states the form given to Gonyea was “substantially identical” to the one delivered to Streever’s wife. DHS separately confirmed to reporters it was still investigating Gonyea’s speech five months after the fact (complaint ¶104). Gonyea’s notice cited 18 U.S.C. §115(a) and §119 (the federal anti-doxxing statute); reporting corroborates the notice’s existence, OPR origin, and boilerplate language, though the specific statute numbers rest on Gonyea’s own published image of the document (see primary-source-ice-opr-warning-notice-gonyea-2026-06-23).

Docket posture. Judge Rudolph Contreras is assigned. Streever’s motion for preliminary injunction was filed July 7, 2026; the government moved to dismiss, transfer venue, and hold PI briefing in abeyance on July 20, 2026. Briefing on the preliminary-injunction motion closed with Streever’s reply on August 12, 2026 (per the docket, last updated August 25, 2026). No ruling on the preliminary-injunction motion had issued as of this entry’s writing (2026-08-27). Per NPR’s August 17, 2026 reporting, DHS’s own court filings argue the in-person warning-notice practice is a “critical tool” that “do[es] not violate the First Amendment” — a defended institutional posture, not a disavowed rogue-officer incident, though DHS’s briefs do not claim Streever’s email constituted a prosecutable threat.

Why This Event Matters

This is the second — and, per the documentary record checked for this entry, still only the second — publicly confirmed instance of ICE OPR issuing an in-person “Warning Notice” to an individual over online or emailed criticism of the agency, rather than over any completed or credibly alleged crime. Both known instances happened on the same day, delivered by the same two-agent team, using “substantially identical” boilerplate (per the plaintiffs’ own complaint) — which argues for an office-level practice at minimum, distinct from claiming a broader institutional policy established across many cases. Do not read this entry as evidence of a documented multi-case pattern beyond n=2. A prior verification pass in this corpus (verify-ice-warning-notice-policy-pattern-claim) found that three previously circulated “prior instances” — Tincher v. Noem, the Memphis SAFE Task Force lawsuit, and the Broadview prayer-ban dispute — involve different mechanisms (press retaliation during enforcement operations; civilian-recording retaliation by a multi-agency task force; a facility-access restriction) and do not belong in any count of this specific mechanism.

The notices themselves invert their own stated legal basis: Gonyea’s citation of the federal anti-doxxing statute (§119) was served by agents who arrived carrying her own doxxed personal information, and DHS separately told NPR she had “committed a federal crime by publishing an ICE officer’s address online” though her post contained no address. Streever’s notice was predicated on an email that made no threat, sent under his real name to a published government address — textbook protected petition-and-speech activity under Tinker-line precedent, per FIRE’s framing of the case.

Broader Context

A different, larger, adjacent mechanism — do not conflate. A Wall Street Journal investigation published August 4, 2026 (“How ICE Is Weaponizing Social Media Against Its Critics”) documents a considerably larger apparatus: approximately $258 million per year in ICE social-media surveillance contracting (up from $164 million), at least 131 doxxing/threat investigations opened January 2025–March 2026, and subpoenas issued to platforms to unmask anonymous critics — the named example being Reddit user “Tired_Thumb.” That is a subpoena-and-surveillance apparatus for unmasking anonymous speech, a materially different legal instrument from an unsigned administrative “Warning Notice” served in person on an already-identified critic. The WSJ piece uses Gonyea as its lead illustrative example of the in-person warning-notice sub-mechanism but does not name a third recipient of that specific document. Separately, an August 25, 2026 amicus brief filed by FIRE, the Speech and Racial Justice Legal Defense Fund, and the CATO Institute in an unrelated Minnesota criminal case (USA v. Sant, 0:26-cr-00115) — filed by the advocacy organization most incentivized to plead a broader pattern, within the last month — enumerates the warning-notice mechanism’s known recipients as “David Streever and Paigelynne Gonyea,” describing Gonyea’s notice as “a similar” one, singular. No litigation document located as of this entry names a third recipient.

Research Gaps

• Preliminary-injunction ruling has not issued; update this entry once Judge Contreras rules.
• RESOLVED 2026-08-28: the surveillance chain used to locate Streever at the NYC hotel is CBP inbound-arrival destination data, not a data broker or financial-record trace. ICE OPR Assistant Director Brent Goodwin’s sworn declaration (filed 2026-08-05, docket entry 20, quoted in NPR’s 2026-08-17 reporting) states agents “obtained the local hotel which Mr. Streever had listed with CBP for his inbound destination,” after separately tracking his return flight to attempt an intercept at JFK. Full mechanism analysis and FOIA scoping: cbp-arrival-declaration-data-hsi-locate-streever-hotel.
• No FOIA’d count of total ICE OPR warning notices issued exists in the public record; DHS/ICE have not responded to records requests per Reason’s August 7, 2026 reporting on the WSJ investigation.
• RESOLVED 2026-08-28: NPR’s “two U.S. citizen observers” is not an error and does not describe a second victim within the Pretti shooting. It refers to two separate, well-documented fatal shootings during Operation Metro Surge: Renée Nicole Good, shot by ICE agent Jonathan Ross on January 7, 2026 (bodycam footage; Guardian and ABC News tier-1 reporting; corpus entry 2026-01-07–ice-agent-kills-legal-observer-minneapolis-operation-metro-surge and actor profile good-renee-nicole), and Alex Pretti, shot by Border Patrol agents on January 24, 2026 (this entry’s own trigger event; corpus entry 2026-01-24–border-patrol-kills-alex-pretti-legal-observer-minneapolis). Both are independently corroborated as fatal shootings of legal/citizen observers by federal immigration enforcement personnel in Minneapolis during Metro Surge; a 154-bishop Episcopal Church letter of 2026-01-31 names both by name in one sentence as “two US citizens killed by federal agents during Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis” (2026-01-31–episcopal-bishops-letter-good-pretti-state-violence). The Streever v. Mullin complaint’s ¶¶52-58 describe only Pretti’s killing because that is the specific incident that triggered Streever’s Jan. 26 email — a complaint’s paragraphs are the plaintiff’s own pleaded allegations, not a comprehensive count of the underlying events. No standalone reconciliation entry was needed: both incidents already had full, independently-sourced standalone timeline entries prior to this pass. Full resolution: verify-minneapolis-operation-metro-surge-shooting-victim-count-one-alex-pretti-per-complaint-nyt-vs-two-per-npr-2026-08-17.

Related Entries

• primary-source-ice-opr-warning-notice-gonyea-2026-06-23 — the authenticated primary-source transcription of Gonyea’s notice
• verify-ice-warning-notice-policy-pattern-claim — the verification pass establishing the two-instance count and correcting the four-case overclaim
• cbp-arrival-declaration-data-hsi-locate-streever-hotel — resolved mechanism note: CBP inbound-destination data, not a data broker or financial trace