The government told the grand jury it never investigates people for thinking. The paperwork it filed in open court says otherwise.

"No one is ever investigated or looked at or even researched on for First Amendment protected activities. Every single individual that we have investigated there is a criminal predicate to why we're investigating them."

— HSI agent Desmond Garcia, telling a federal grand jury why the people in the dock were being charged

The first time most Americans heard the words "Operation Puppet Master," they heard them inside a motion for discovery. That is the quiet, bureaucratic way a mass surveillance program reveals itself: not with a press conference, but because a defense attorney finally forced the government to hand over its own homework. The documents, filed in a federal case against fifteen Minnesotans, describe something the government has spent the last year insisting it did not do: the systematic, secret investigation of ordinary people for doing ordinary things.

The backdrop is winter. Late last year, the Department of Homeland Security sent roughly 3,000 federal officers into the Minneapolis and St. Paul area for what it called its "largest immigration enforcement operation ever." The crackdown, Operation Metro Surge, produced thousands of arrests, months of nightly noise protests aimed at the hotels where agents were staying, and the fatal shootings of two American citizens. Two weeks after federal agents killed Alex Pretti on January 24, Homeland Security Investigations opened a probe. It was named Puppet Master. A second, Project Whipple Shield, took its name from the federal building that had become the protest's fixed point.

In the government's telling, the two operations existed to track a "network of conspirators" helping "violent opportunists and agitators." The reality in the reports looks different. Undercover agents were inside Sunrise Movement trainings held at a church and at a public library. They were in the Signal groups planning hotel noise protests. They were at meetings at a Lutheran church in Roseville, photographing the parking lot and pulling license plate numbers so they could compile names, addresses, family and employment details for people who had simply shown up. At least one agent used Clearview AI, a commercial facial recognition tool, to build photo dossiers of protesters, many of whom were never charged with anything.

A DHS slide deck, prepared for the grand jury and titled "The Conspiracy," connected eighteen organizations to the alleged plot. They ranged from a small Minneapolis bicycle repair collective to the AFL-CIO, the largest labor federation in the country. The defense attorney who pulled the filing, Kevin Riach, called it a "broad and irrational investigation" driven by politics rather than criminal conduct. His client, Isaac Sant, has no known ties to any of it. He pleaded not guilty.

Then there is the bit about the construction worker. At a January 31 meeting in a Minneapolis library, an undercover agent identified only as "UCA 9833" sat in on a Sunrise Movement session. The agent's own report notes that it was "made clear that the Sunrise Movement organization focused on 'peaceful' protests." The session covered sit-ins, de-escalation, keeping a safety marshal and a police liaison on hand. In the middle of all that, the agent leaned in and told one organizer that he worked in construction and "could build items that might assist other groups with more 'direct-action' protests." When the agent added that going to jail "did not bother him," the organizer took down his phone number.

That is the whole thing, and it is the most damning part. This is not surveillance of a criminal. This is a government agent, in a library, trying to hand an activist the blueprint for a crime he did not intend to commit, and then logging the interest as evidence. In every era, the legal line between investigating a movement and manufacturing one is drawn at exactly this moment. Riach wrote that the agents "actively participated in organizing and directing the groups they were surveilling, at times working to entice people into discussing or committing crimes." The government's own agent filed a report that reads like a confession to the charge.

The money trail tells the same story. On March 9, ICE served subpoenas for Sunrise Movement's wire transactions reaching back to January 2023, before this president was even in office. The same day it subpoenaed the Clearing House, a private wire transfer firm, for years of records on Sunrise and several unions, including SEIU and CWA. The requests went to the Federal Reserve and to FedWire, and they carried a warning not to tell anyone. "You are requested not to disclose the existence of this summons for an indefinite period of time." These were administrative subpoenas, issued by the agency itself rather than by a judge. The groups never found out, and were never given a chance to object.

Ahilan Arulanantham, a law professor at UCLA, put it in the plain terms a juror might use. He called the program "very disturbing" and warned it could "deter people from expressing their beliefs," what he called "that fear of that creeping police state." Claude Cummings Jr., president of the CWA, said his union had "become the latest target of a corrupt administration that weaponizes the legal process against law-abiding Americans exercising our Constitutional rights."

What makes this more than a local scandal is the order from the top. A September presidential memorandum directed the Justice Department and Homeland Security to investigate "all participants in these criminal and terroristic conspiracies," including the "funding sources" and "organized structures" behind them. It also widened the legal definition of domestic terrorism to cover acts like revealing the personal details of federal agents or getting in the way of an immigration arrest. The memo is the scaffolding on which Puppet Master was built, and it is not the only building using it. At least half of the original Minnesota anti-ICE assault cases have already been thrown out. The prosecutions are collapsing, which is why the surveillance paperwork now matters so much. It is what is left standing when the charges fall down.

The groups responded the way they did in January. A coalition of Minneapolis organizations, distributed by Unidos MN, said "we know the truth, and we will not be intimidated." DHS declined to explain itself, offering the standard line that it does not "comment on ongoing investigations, investigative tactics, or procedures." A foundation that takes money from conservative and libertarian donors, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, said the "aggressive scrutiny chills protected speech and association."

The administration insists it is fighting violent criminals. The reports say it was watching churches and libraries and a bicycle collective, photographing a parking lot, subpoenaing three years of a nonprofit's banking, and whispering about building things to a kid who had come to a library to talk about staying safe. You can call the program what it is: a government that decided, in the middle of losing a public opinion war it had started in someone else's winter, that the people protesting it were the threat. The grand jury heard that no one gets investigated for thinking. The open court documents say exactly that, and then show it being done.