https://michaeldsellers.substack.com/p/dhss-two-front-intimidation-apparatus
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On the street, it looks like menace. At your desk, it looks like paperwork. Put them together and you get something recognizably authoritarian: a modern intimidation apparatus that can follow you home and unmask you online—without ever asking a judge. In the last few weeks, two separate storylines have snapped into focus. In Minnesota, protesters and civilian “observers” say federal agents escalated beyond crowd control into personal intimidation—showing up at people’s homes, calling out names and addresses, photographing them, and making it unmistakable threat: we can find you. And across the country, Homeland Security has reportedly ramped up a quieter campaign: issuing hundreds of administrative subpoenas to tech companies demanding identifying information on social media accounts that track ICE activity or criticize the agency—names, emails, phone numbers, IP details. Different theaters. Same message. This is worth a deeper look. The “we know where you live” doctrineThe Minnesota filings describe something beyond the usual tensions of protest policing. The recurring claim is personal targeting. One protest monitor, Daniel Woo, says he tailed an ICE-linked SUV and watched it drive straight to his neighborhood—then stop in front of his house. “They just came over to intimidate me,” he said. Another resident, Emily Beltz, describes following an SUV that then turned aggressively toward her—then a masked passenger leaned out and shouted her name and home address, taunting: “we’re going to take you home.” Katie Henly says suspected agents drove to her house, photographed her, and later confronted her at a stop sign—one holding what she described as a large rifle while another continued taking pictures. “I was more scared of that camera than I was of that gun,” she said. If these accounts are even directionally accurate, they represent a shift from enforcement to intimidation: not merely policing conduct in public, but projecting state power into private life to chill future participation. This is the muscle-memory of regimes that don’t trust the public: make a few people feel personally unsafe, and thousands learn the lesson. The subpoena machine: unmasking dissent without a warrantThe second front is less cinematic and arguably more dangerous because it scales. According to reporting and civil-liberties filings, DHS has been sending major platforms (Google, Meta, Reddit, Discord and others) administrative subpoenas seeking identifying information behind accounts that track or criticize ICE. Unlike warrants, these subpoenas do not require a judge’s approval. The government’s stated theory is officer safety: that it’s investigating threats or “impediments” to agents in the field. But the civil-liberties concern is obvious: when the state can demand user identities for political speech—especially speech critical of the state—anonymity becomes conditional. It ceases to be a right people rely on and becomes a privilege granted by corporate compliance. The ACLU and EFF have both described the move as a major escalation, warning that administrative subpoena power is being used as a shortcut around judicial oversight and as a tool that places the burden on private citizens to fight the government in court. The connective tissue: surveillance tools + a “database” mindsetThese aren’t isolated tactics. They reinforce each other. Once you assume the state is building a posture of deterrence—make people afraid to watch us, film us, criticize us, or coordinate against us—a familiar pattern emerges:
Even the rhetoric is telling. In the reporting around these disputes, officials and allied spokespeople repeatedly cast protest monitoring as “impeding operations”, “endangering agents” or as something close to seditious. And outside Minnesota, reporting and advocacy groups point to broader use of digital tools and data practices that can identify and track people connected to protests and enforcement activity—exactly the kind of infrastructure that turns a handful of incidents into a nationwide deterrence machine. What makes this “creeping authoritarianism” instead of just “hard policing”A democracy can enforce immigration law. A democracy can also police violent protests. But “creeping authoritarianism” is when enforcement becomes exemplary punishment and preemptive deterrence—when the state begins treating scrutiny itself as the threat. The through-line here is not simply arrests. It’s a campaign against accountability:
This is not how a confident government behaves. This is how a government behaves when it wants fewer witnesses. Looking ahead . . . .Things to look for in the coming weeks:
Because once the precedent is set—no judge, just subpoenas; no crime, just “impeding”; no public incident, just a home visit—it doesn’t stay in one lane. It spreads. And there is good reason to be concerned that these policies are doing just that — spreading and embedding themselves deeper in the system. SOURCES https://www.nytimes.com/2026/ https://www.nytimes.com/2026/ https://www.washingtonpost. https://www.aclu.org/cases/ https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/ https://www.axios.com/local/ |
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